Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Seven hours and then thirty minutes on March 15, 2012

From my good friend, colleague, and occasional poet, Bob Orr:



It was last Thursday,
and I had worked with others for seven hours
at a Habitat house over in Ypsilanti.
I came home dirty, and sweaty. 
I peeled off my clothes and put them in the washer. 
I stepped into the shower and tried to keep from going down 
the drain myself.  Tiredness and aching muscles engulfed me. 
With a change of clothes, a shower and dinner,
my energy began to recover. 

Then the weather became the news.
Dexter, Michigan (19 miles northwest of Ypsilanti) was in the path of a storm. 
It dumped two inches of water and golf-ball-size hail. 
About five o'clock a tornado with winds exceeding 130 mph hit the ground for thirty minutes
leaving a path 7.2 miles long. 
Two hundred residents were displaced, but no one got hurt.
A hundred homes were damaged and ten were destroyed. 

I'll return next week  to work on the same Habitat house,
but I'll still be thinking about the tornado of last Thursday and what it
did to so many homes and lives in just thirty minutes.