The Record Newspapers - Hometown News For Orange County, Texas

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to feel like a bowling pin at the end of an alley with a fifteen-pound ball heading directly for me. More and more, I hear people claiming ‘this is their last one’. They’re going to move out of the path of hurricanes.

My only thought on the subject is that it’s hard to find a spot to avoid the wrath of Mother Nature.

Personally, I prefer the danger we face here to living where you face snow and ice problems. It seems like to me that those in the north are constantly without power throughout the winter, every winter.

And then there are those in the middle of the country facing the threat of tornadoes.

Regardless of where we live, we’ll face some threat at some time that we have to face.

When I was a youth in the Panhandle, we were hit often with blizzards that kept us inside for days at a time.

One March when I was in third or fourth grade, a spring blizzard blew in. We had drifts against the house higher than my head.

An uncle and aunt with their youngsters lived a few miles out of town. Now Wheeler is on the rolling plains, an area covered with sandhills. The valleys between those hills filled with snow.

Some of our family left town to see about them. I went along. I don’t remember much except the last half mile we had to struggle through snow up to my waist.

While I have fond memories of that town, I don’t miss the snow, nor the dust. Yeah, dust storms. Big time dust storms.

In the almost forty years I’ve been in Port Neches, I remember one dust storm back in the early seventies. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, but next morning, there was a film of dust on the car.

In the Panhandle, you couldn’t mistake it, a huge red cloud rolling over the horizon. It did a fine sanding job on automobiles, especially windshields, which were so scratched that at night, they shattered headlights into thousands of pieces. And the storms didn’t help the paint jobs even though back them most cars were black.

Mom would put towels under the doors and around the windowsills.

After the storm, there was always a tiny row of dust along the sill.

My grandparents lived out on the Great Plains, birthplace of hundreds of tornadoes.

I lost count of the number of times they hustled us out to the storm cellar, a musty-smelling chamber underground with a curved roof and a heavy wood door.

The cellar is where Mama Holley kept the fruits and vegetables she canned.

Now often we were frightened when we scurried down there.

I’ve often wondered how much of the fear was from the oncoming storm and from the snakes we always seemed to disturb.

One good thing about a tornado, if there is anything good about one, is that it’s fast.

You don’t have a whole lot of time to think, you just react.

But the hurricane, well, days of anticipation don’t