You would think that being 39 years old and having experienced some great tragedy in my life would’ve toughened me up by now. Hell no! I am still deathly afraid of thunder. I can remember as a child, a teenager and even as a adult; I would crawl into my grandmothers bed whenever there was talk of the any type of bad weather. I moved away after graduating from high school, but I wasn’t that far away that I couldn’t drive back home to what I considered a “safe place”. You would think the lightening would scare me. It did, but the sound of thunder always made me feel like God was raising His voice.
Our little town had always experienced the worst of the worst when there was heavy rain, thunderstorms and tornados. It would flood, knock down power lines and some people lost everything including their lives. No matter how bad it got, it seemed to always happen around us. We could literally stand outside and see a funnel cloud across the railroad tracks and it would never make its way to our house. There were some winds, at times, that made me feel like the house would probably be on the other side of town the next morning but it never happened that way. I told people my granny had a special relationship with God and so did my mom, but granny had it longer than my mom. I trusted that whatever pact they had was solid. Lol.
After my grandmother passed away that safety zone was my mom. When my mom got sick I had to put on my big girl draws (I’m still scared) and pretend the storm doesn’t bother me. I remember while my mom was in the hospital for several months, when it stormed I didn’t want leave. I figured that she was in that coma talking to my brothers and my grandmother coming up with a game plan to keep me safe. That’s exactly what they did. So now when there’s talk of a storm I call my mom, she tells me I will be okay and I believe her.
