It just got worse from there.

My Brother In Law snow blow-ed the drive at 10am, and the drift around the car was back half-as-high an hour later… and bigger than before not long after that.

About 11am, the neighbor across the street got his Grand Am stuck on the street in front of my house (where the truck is in the photo).

Winter Advisory

Now it’s almost whiteout conditions (3pm).  This is the 4th time this has happened in a month (this much snow and drifting in front of my house).  I think it’s time to either plant a hedge row, or erect a snow fence.  The drift in this photo isn’t the same one from the photo above — that one was completely removed and then this one formed within a couple hours.

Strange Formations

Check out these strange formations, and keep in mind that I didn’t have my garage door opened all day.  This is all snow that accumulated from about 6am through 3pm, all blown through the cracks between the garage door segments and perimeter.  The reason it’s interesting to me is because these drifts “grew upward” throughout the day, like a stalagmite (stalactite?) that grows up from the bottom of a cave… but there’s not corresponding precipitation from above in this scenario.  There’s no big snow formation attached to the ceiling above.

Aftermath

Here I am the next day; our neighbor cleaned out the drive except for this drift… looks like my wife is going to have some serious shoveling ahead of her if she wants to go anywhere : )

Yes, those are my Penguin Pants.

It was a Friday.  T-minus 1 day and counting.  We could hardly contain ourselves.  

My friend lived next door to my grandmother, my family and I now live where she did.  I also lived there before she did, up until I was 6, which is how I first became friends with Scott. 

That night we fell asleep in his basement on a hide-a-bed.  Scott’s parents and older sister were upstairs in this ranch-style home.  Just before dawn there was an incredibly loud booming noise followed by a terrified woman’s scream.  In my sleepiness, I assumed a large and heavy dresser had fallen over.  That’s the only thing my brain could think of which would make such a racket in the peaceful home.  

I didn’t want to get up.  I was a very sound sleeper.   A sound of hysterical sobbing was coming from upstairs.  I assumed his teenaged sister was blowing something out of proportion. Scott told me to get up, he was alarmed.  This wasn’t normal to him at all.  I had started to hope for the best (a fallen dresser), assume the worst (someone was hurt), and just laid there hoping I could get another hour of sleep before the big day at Adventureland.  Scott went upstairs to check it out.  I don’t remember how long it was before he came back down and told me that I “…need to see this.”  It could have been 30 seconds or 10 minutes.  

When I went upstairs, things did not look the same.  What immediately struck me was the breeze I could feel.  You don’t feel refreshing Spring breezes in most homes.  Every window in the house had imploded. That was the loud noise.  Debris were strewn all over the floor.  

The ranch-style home, like all of them, has 2 short sides and 2 long sides.  Like a shoebox.  One short side is the attached-garage end.  The other short side made up the walls of 2 separate bedrooms (Scott’s parents’ bedroom being one of them).  This wall was ripped outward, hanging as if it was hinged from where it met the top of the foundation, so that it was attached to the house at floor level, but gradually yawned outward a few feet at ceiling-height.  Think of a mailbox with the door hanging slightly open.

I’m sure there was a lot of other messed up stuff going on, but by that time I was on my way next door to see how my Grandma was doing.  

It was shocking to see her house.  The attached garage was no longer attached.  The tornado had swept all the supporting structure out from underneath the garage, leaving the roof to collapse on top of her 1985 Buick Park Ave.  She loved that car.  So did all of her grandchildren.  We would drive around with Grandma listening to Bill Cosby stand-up tapes and old standards like “Big Bad John,” “Daddy Sang Bass, Mama Sang Tenor,” and “Goin‘ UP to Alaska, Up North the Rush is On.”  I’m not sure if those are the titles of the songs, it’s just how I remember them.  She bought that car used after the Governor of our state had driven it for a year.  That sort of fact impresses grandkids.  

Grandma was a light sleeper.  After grandpa died, she had 2 twin beds in her bedroom, and there was sometimes an argument between which one of us got to sleep in the other bed in her room.  We would watch Dr. Who until we fell asleep on Friday nights, and then Nick at Nite in later years.  But she was a light sleeper.  She heard the wind pick up and decided she should go to the basement.  No sooner did she get the basement door shut behind her, she heard the garage tear loose from the rest of the house and the roof fall on top of everything in it.  I wonder what that sounded like?  The door to the garage is no more than 5 foot opposite the hollow interior door to the basement.  

She was alright though.  Shaken, not hurt.  

Months, if not almost a year later, a neighbor from almost a half-mile away called Grandma to let her know that he found her suitcase in the field behind his house.  It had ID tags on the handle.  The suitcase had been in the garage before the tornado got a hold of it.

The ditches were full of water, and over the next hour a flurry of relatives came pouring into the neighborhood.  My brother and dad showed up, and we got to walk on the roof of the garage while my dad assessed the damage.  The peak of this roof used to be about 15 feet up.  Now it was 6 feet  up, and sloped down so we could just step onto it from the ground.  I remember enjoying this.  Maybe because I liked walking on roofs, something not every 11 year old gets to do very often.

After another hour or so of bystanders and passersby I was awake and the novelty of this tornado experience was wearing off.  The ugly reality was setting in: We may not go to Adventureland today.

Scott and I had a meeting on the street in front of the 2 broken homes.  I was standing and he was sitting on his bicycle with his feet on the street.  I asked him if he thought we were still going to Adventureland.  I asked him this as I viewed his mother with her mother,  standing in front of the house, crying in each others’ arms.  

Scott wasn’t sure if we would go or not.  

I wanted clarification.  

Did Scott think we were just going to delay the trip until this afternoon?  

Are we going to have to wait all the way until tomorrow?

I told Scott he should go ask his mom if we’re still going.  I needed to know.  The suspense was too much for me.  This suspense was caused by my suspicion that the Adventureland trip was increasingly unlikely, pitted against my hopes that everyone would come to their senses and realize that after your home gets hit by a devastating Act of God, it’s best to go to an amusement park to take the edge off.

We didn’t go to Adventureland.  I don’t remember what we did the rest of the day.