Snoopin’ with the Snoop

She lied to her teacher one day, but it wasn’t really a lie. Her teacher wanted to know how recess had gone; she wanted to know if the other girls had taunted the child with calls of “I wish you were dead” for another day. They hadn’t, but recess hadn’t been fine like the first-grader said. It had been worse.

She had a crush on a sixth-grader who rode her bus. He was tall, quiet, and dark-haired. He would later sign her yearbook — in cursive — and she wouldn’t read it until she was older.

With a kickball in her hands, up on the hill next to the warm brick of the building, with the noon-hour sun trekking up the southern sky from east to west, she smiled when she saw Aaron sitting with his lunch tray on his lap.

Bright and yellow was the day.

“Hi Aaron,” she called, bouncing the kickball high off the ground. Stretching her hands to retrieve it, she missed, and the kickball bounced happily into his mashed potatoes.

She blushed brick red and ran far across the playground to the swings and slider and spent the rest of recess dreading the coming question.

“How was recess?”
“Fine.”

But not really…

Hey, I’m trying to compile a photo book and don’t remember our schedule exactly. I have 4 missing tours. Anyone remember where they go? Or any corrections if needed?

sometime was moapa/corncreek (weeding/decommissioning)
a (fourth or fifth) ash meadows
a second athel
??

1 orientation
2 12 days of planting (4 days and then 8 days)
3 trash with marco (11/19-11/21: thanksgiving)
4 rainbow gardens (11/26-11/29: nvum training)
5 rainbow gardens (12/3-12/6)
6 athel (12/10-12/17)

*christmas break*

7 mormon mountains (1/2-1/9)
8 sahara mustard arizona (1/14-1/17)
9 MLK, Hiko Wash, Rainbow (MLK(21), 1/22-1/25)
10 Corn Creek fencing (1/28-1/31)
11 Ash Meadows fencing (2/4-2/7)

12 (2/11-2/14)
13 AM f?(2/18-2/21)
14 (2/25-2/28)
15 (3/3-3/6)

16 pahranaget (3/10-3/17) (six days off)
17 trash with nccc (3/24-3/27)
18 ash meadows cattails (3/31-4/3)
19 sahara mustard weeding (4/7-4/11)
20 eglington preserve (4/14-4/18)
21 ash meadows cattails (4/21-4/25)
22 Lovell Canyon (4/28-5/1)

I miss the days when I was younger, when it seemed that every Tuesday night, with my mom’s chicken still on the grill cooking for dinner, with her tasty barbecue sauce, our dinner would be interrupted by a severe thunderstorm warning. We joked that the storms came for her good cooking.

Or, weeks that my dad went on business trips, when we were sure to get a tornado warning in the dead of the night. I remember one night, where the walls were visibly inhaling and exhaling in a pressured rhythm until the damper on the fireplace slid open. That may seem like nothing much, but my mom used to have to pound the damper handle with a hammer to get it to open. When we ventured out the next morning, the cap on my neighbor’s chimney was gone, and his staggered wooden fence was dismantled as if someone had walked along it, gently lowering each log on his way. Such strange happenings.

I’ve been told that most people go through their lives without ever having seen a tornado. I count myself lucky to be among those who’ve seen one (more than one actually), and also haven’t been touched by it. Physically touched, or negatively emotionally touched; I’ve definitely been touched with a love of severe weather.

I’ve seen five tornadoes, a funnel cloud, and rotation that later became a tornado. I was actually scared of thunderstorms, even the calm ones, until I was in fifth grade. I remember before fifth grade, when my mom and dad would be putting away the dishes after I had gone to bed, and I would hear the cupboards shut, and I would sneak out of my bed timidly asking them if we were in a thunderstorm. I was much like our dog, Oliver, in that way, as he was terrified of thunderstorms as well, though he wasn’t afraid of the cupboards. During one of our numerous tornado warnings, my dad, as usual, was wandering around the house looking out the windows, peering this way and that trying to get the best view of the clouds. Occasionally, much to my mom’s dismay, he would roam outside looking into the sky. I remember trying to convince him to come to the basement with me, yet he very insistently asked my sister and me to come look at the cloud that was rotating above our house. Terror turned to fascination. Since then I’ve seen only one tornado. Four tornadoes before and the lone funnel cloud before as well.

We’ve avoided the brunt of all storms so far since I got back in mid May, much to my dismay. All we’ve gotten is rain. And lots of rain. The ground is waterlogged, but so far of the creek has not flooded. I detest nightly tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, because since the sun isn’t around, I can’t see the cloud formations. We’re under a tornado watch until 2 a.m., and it doesn’t look like anything is going to happen before sundown, so if anything happens after then, I’ll be quite disappointed.

The tornadoes I’ve seen:

• Heyworth cone
• NE column
• 2 tornadoes and a funnel cloud while on the expressway in Colorado on vacation
• The F0 fluke, on the day before I started junior high school, in the field south of our subdivision

(With a bit of editing, I could turn this into a creative nonfiction piece. Something for me to keep in mind.)

Up on the roof today, while cleaning the hundreds of maple seeds out the gutters after having noticed waterfalls coming over the eaves yesterday during our 1.5 inches of rain, I realized, one, just how high I had climbed on various hills when in the NCC, and two, how natural it felt to be at a higher elevation, looking down. My head felt much more at ease up there than it has down on the ground. For a flatlander, I used to think that the roof, one and a half stories high, was tall. Up there today, though I had my usual vertigo near the edge, I didn’t feel as if I were high at all. I felt I wanted to go up another one or one and a half times the height I was already at, and then i’d start to be at the difference in elevations when I used to climb in the desert.

While clearing out the house a few days ago, the continual process that it is, I found one of my journals from when I was in college. In perusing it, I could tell that during those years I continually wrote (as a writer for my college newspaper, The Argus). My writing voice was punchy, and I didn’t continually depend on a handful of words and constructions. This post and my previous posts on this blog lack the voice I had as a writer. They lack ME as a writer. And I lack the discipline with which I used to expand and expound on a subject in an entertaining way. The paragraph above can be a creative non-fiction piece, or any other form, and could flow better, and tell itself better. Such is the challenge to me. Where I used to take liberties with my writing, and succeeded as an established writer in my niche, now I stand-by for the short, monotonous exposition.