When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #31

Story #31 - Lighting strikes in the driveway! Yikes!

When you see the lightening flash and hear thunder crack loud in the sky, does that scare you?

My mom had two fears in her life, one was mice and the second one was lightening and thunder! I don’t like powerful windstorms; those scare me! My mom did like soft thunder just not the loud and frightening kind of thunder. She would tell us that when we heard the soft rolling thunder that it was an apple cart dumping over on the cobblestones up in heaven. A horse drawn wagon was pulling his load of apples. The wagon had bushel baskets of apples. When the wagon hit a bump in the cobblestone, a bushel basket of apples would fall out of the back of the wagon onto the road. The apples rolling along the road was the sound of the rolling thunder. Although this story is fiction, it comforted me and I could imagine it actually happening. When I had children of my own and they were little and they were frightened of the lightening and thunder I would tell them that story.

Living in southern New Mexico we saw some very spectacular lightening storms! When you heard the thunder you ran to get indoors! It was not uncommon to see the lightening go from the sky to the ground and from the ground back up into the sky. Sometimes when a thunderstorm blew in the sky was ominous and dark and the lightening bolts were bright and scary! Just little systems that blew through were not so bad. You have heard that when you see the lightening count the seconds and when you hear the thunder each second you counted equals how many miles away the lightening is. For example, you see the lightening flash in the sky and you start counting, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three and so on until you hear the crash of the thunder! If you counted three seconds and you heard the thunder clap, the lightening was three miles away. That didn’t always work where we lived. Sometimes the lightening struck in our driveway! We saw the clouds in the mountains and then we got the breeze and we could smell the rain in the air coming toward us. We would wait to hear thunder and if it was faint, we continued to play outside or work or whatever activity we were doing. If the thunder was louder, we scooted into the house quick! One day when this happened we looked out our kitchen window and ‘crack’ the lightening and thunder hit at the same time! We saw a puff of dust come up from our dirt-gravel driveway. The lightening hit 25 feet from the house!

My dad had built a shop and garage in the back yard. We had a beautiful pomegranate tree growing behind the shop. It was about 6 feet tall. The pomegranates would be the size of a baseball and some were softball size. They were so delicious to eat! We had a thunderstorm and the lightening and thunder cracked at the same time. My brother said he saw smoke coming from behind the shop. There was a perfect black zigzag from the top of the tree to the bottom. That tree never did grow the same after that. The fruit after that grew very small. There is a powerful amount of voltage from lightening. That’s why people are killed when they get hit.

My dad would tease about my mom being afraid of the sound of thunder. She would unplug the television and any small appliances. It was not uncommon for lightening to hit television antennas on rooftops. The charge would go through the television and it would blow out the screen. After she unplugged everything she went into her bedroom. My dad would say, “She’s dug a foxhole under her bed and she’s hiding in it! She’ll come out when the storm blows over.” She did not think that was very funny!

When I was married and just had Michelle at the time, I flew from Oregon down to El Paso, Texas. My parents had to drive 100 miles to get to the airport. It just happened that the afternoon I flew in there was a thunderstorm in the area. The pilot told us not to worry and that all planes were grounded with a lightening rod and we would be fine. From the air and looking out the little port window in the plane it was quite a show watching the lightening on the skyline. We landed safely and it was sunny and no rain in that immediate area. My mom looked a little bit pale. My dad told me that it was the thunderstorm and she was in a panic that our plane would get hit! We were fine.

The one thing I am still afraid of is strong windstorms. When your grandpa and I were married about one year we moved from New Mexico up to Oregon. He was in the United States Air Force and his enlistment was up and we moved back to Oregon where his parents lived. He was going to Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, which was about 35minutes away from where we lived. I was working at US Bank. One afternoon around 3:00p.m. the sky got ominous black and we heard on the radio that a tornado was in the area. We watched the sky out the big picture window at the front of the bank. One quarter of the sky was very black and a funnel shaped cloud filled that quadrant of the sky. We watched it move slowly from west to east. It skirted slowly behind some mountains and then off toward Vancouver, Washington. It was ‘very scary’ to watch as we did not know where it would touch down. Grandpa was at school and I worried he would be in it. We lived out in Clackamas where the black cloud was and I wondered if our mobile home park would be hit. It appeared it was not going to hit where we were at work in the bank. We were just so relieved and grateful it moved on.


We heard an hour later on the news that the tornado touched down in Vancouver, Washington, about one hour north of us. It had just missed Portland. It touched down on an elementary school where just half an hour earlier school had let out and thankfully nobody was in the building. It destroyed the school; only the walls were standing, as it was a brick building. How tragic that would have been if school had not let out. That happened about 37 years ago and today I am still uneasy when the clouds and sky turn ominous black. I watch to see if any tornado funnel formations are in the sky. That is an experience I shall never forget!