Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the South, I live in the South: Athens, Georgia. I’ve tried to leave, a few times, but I always come back. Nowhere else feels like home.
Storms of My Youth
There was a tornado warning. I was six years old. It was the first time I was aware enough to understand about threats. Danger. The kind your parents can’t protect you from. Something was coming and it wasn’t good.
I heard my parents talking. My mother could see that it worried me. She said we would be safe inside. She said, “See that cloud? It looks like a clown.”
The cloud hung low in the sky. It wasn’t part of the sky; it had a life of its own. It seemed to contain the whole of the threat. I thought, That’s where the tornado will come from.
“Do you see the clown?” my mother asked.
I said I did, but I didn’t.
Every summer we spent a week at Granny and Paw-Paw’s. After lunch, while Paw-Paw went back to work and Granny napped or watched TV, me and my brother would play paper baseball in the backyard. Home run derby. We looked up statistics in the newspaper. We’d never seen any of these men hit. We would make up batting styles based on the sound of their name. Jorge Orta and Jesse Barfield. Doug DeCinces and Gary Gaetti. Andre Dawson, Pedro Guerrero, Gorman Thomas. Fred Lynn.
The air was thick. You wore it like a blanket; sweat rolled down your forehead, pooled on your eyebrows, trickled down your cheek. In between pitches, you fanned away gnats. They would sometimes find their way into your eyes or your mouth.
In the afternoon, a storm might announce its presence. First a breeze blows in and changes the air. Now it’s light and cool. Then gray clouds crowd the horizon, and it grows dark. The breeze again, stronger, hissing through the trees. Then the slow roll of distant thunder.
We have a couple minutes. Time for one more batter. Always one more batter. It felt different, these moments. An urgency that was the opposite of the languid days of summer. Thunder, louder now. A flick of lightning behind the clouds; a sharp crack, that’s what thunder sounds like when it’s close. If we don’t come in soon, Granny will come out to get us.
Just one more swing.
The first fat drops of rain fall. Ping, on the tin roof. Ping-ping-ping. The final pitch, swing and miss; you go for the ball and throw it back to your brother. “One more!” But the sky opens up, he can’t hear you, he’s running for cover. The rain makes a sound like rushing traffic; your t-shirt soaked, it clings to your chest.
We stay on the porch to watch the storm, to wait for it to be over. But some part of me never wants it to end.
