When I was growing up, May always brought thoughts of "tornado time." These days, tornado season seems to start much earlier.

Before I was born, the family, Mama, Daddy and brother Hassell, almost three, got ready to "go to town," a big trip for a farm family ten miles away. Back then, errands had to be planned carefully so that no thoughtlessness would necessitate another trip.

Daddy had recently purchased a new Chevy, then parked in a farm shed. Mama carefully tied her too-small rings into a handkerchief to have them sized. Her fingers had swollen with the added weight of her pregnancy.

Daddy was about ready to get out the car when he decided to await the passing of the impending thunderstorm. As they waited, Mama and Daddy heard that ominous freight-train sound. They quickly put on coats and wraps to shield themselves from flying debris and huddled together away from windows in the center of the house. They heard the frightful roar, the splintering of wood and the shattering glass.

In a few short moments, Daddy was picking through debris, finding Mama badly hurt, lying in the rain and mud among timbers and sheets of tin. She sent him to look for my brother. Daddy finally found him by following the sound of his crying across the dirt road in a freshly plowed field, covered with the coarse red dirt of those hills. He had apparently been tumbled along the ground, the force of the wind actually driving the dirt into his skin.

Daddy was hurt, too, but not as badly. A passerby stopped, offering as much first aid as he could, then drove them to the Laurens County Hospital. All three were hospitalized, Daddy and Hassell for a week or two, Mama for several months. She'd been gashed badly on the head and in the groin area, the fate of her unborn child unknown. In later years, we learned that series of storms had killed a number of people in Laurens County.

Hassell's third birthday was celebrated in the hospital. He recalls a cake with candles being brought to him there. Our cousin Lewis describes Hassell as being like one huge skinned knee!

When she was released from the hospital, Mama stayed a short while with Daddy's family, then went to south Georgia to continue her recuperation under the care of her mother and sisters. I'm sure brother Hassell was well cared for, even spoiled, by all the adult attention. I never knew if Daddy drove them down to Georgia or if they had traveled by train. After the tornado, he returned the new automobile and never again paid for anything "on time!"

So it came about that I was born in Turner County, Ga., in August of that year. In all the stories Mama told us about the storm, she did not mention whether I was full-term or early. I do know that we stayed a few months for the simple reason that back then women did not travel soon after giving birth, nor do I know the mode of travel to return to South Carolina. My mother's brothers and sisters came from various parts of Georgia to visit her, my brother and the "miracle baby."

For a time after our return to Laurens County, my parents rented the upper story of a two-story house in Gray Court. The Red Cross donated some furniture and household goods to the family. I still have an oak chest, the bottom cabinet of a washstand, as a memento of that time. The oil lamps may have come from there as well.

A couple of years later, friends and neighbors gathered to build a simple frame home on a hill overlooking the Simpson home place, which Daddy would farm thereafter. My painting of "Simpson Hill 'Butchering Time'" incorporates that house, which had been expanded years later. As we grew up, another child, my sister, was born in that tiny house.

During our childhood, whenever a storm approached, both parents would become nervous and watchful. As skies darkened, we'd put on winter coats for protection and huddle in the center of the bed in the room furthest away from the storm direction, usually west. One of our parents would have gone around opening all windows just a crack to avoid creating the vacuum that would cause the home to shatter (their surmise).

Daddy would rove from window to window, watching, probably praying that hail would not damage his crops. If the storm became severe enough in his estimation, we'd all run out the front door to the stormpit, a shelter that he'd constructed in the tall bank beside the drive. It had timbered sides and ceiling, and a dirt "shelf" topped with an old bedspring to sit on. Daddy would station himself at the door to check on the storm. The storm shelter was a scary place to young kids though Daddy checked it periodically for spiders and snakes. We would go back to the house when winds and rain had abated. Afterwards, we'd run outside and enjoy the rainbows!

I was about ten when my parents' former neighbors at the tornado site drove up one evening. They did not come in. It was the custom to chat outdoors in good weather when someone just dropped by; farm families knew the day had been long and hard. The Barksdales had come to bring Mama's wedding band, turned up by a workman plowing the field just beyond the demolished house. They had recognized the initials when the plowman brought the ring to them.

Thereafter, the ring never left Mama's finger. After her death, my brother and I, the two siblings with tornado connections, alternated keeping the ring, I on a neck chain when I had it. Finally, after it went back and forth several times, Hassell told me just to keep it. It now resides in a shadow box frame with pictures of her from girlhood to senior adult, an ivory fan and a lace handkerchief both of which she always carried, and the ring on the finger of the gloves she wore at my first wedding.

In telling us children about the tornado, Mama would describe all of the events of that period, which I have included here. She would show us the few mud-stained photographs, a bit of homespun fabric, the scars in her scalp. She would discreetly show my sister and me the scars in her upper thighs and groin. During our childhood there were occasions when extended family and friends would gather for a picnic at "the shoals" on Rabon Creek or even at our own pasture creek. I could sense some unspoken concern or interest on the part of others about the weather, me, and so on. I was such a self-conscious and timid child that it may have been my imagination. For what it's worth, I also have felt a responsibility all my life to make something of my life, to make it count somehow. My highly successful, loving, caring and compassionate children are my crowning achievements, and as they go on to do even larger things, the existence of the "miracle baby" may be justified.

Excerpted from "Iris Remembers" by Iris Simpson Arant-Kittrell, EdD.

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