WILD NIGHT

Easter went on a rampage in the southern states. Devastating tornadic weather swept through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, parts of Tennessee.

The news media hardly mentioned it. They were too busy force-feeding you an overdose of the Virus Bullshit. 

Easter always crowds my mind with appealingly sweet thoughts of spring: pastel flowers, fragrant blossoms, soft blue skies, ripe green fields - bunnies and baby chicks.

Here in the wilds of Tennessee Easter Sunday was drenched with torrential rain, dark with dismal skies, and chilly enough to make me hibernate under winter blankets.

It was a joyless day, but the really  wicked weather waited until dusk before it arrived. The winds whipped up with such incredible force that I thought I was back in Texas. 

I tried to ignore the howling gusts until suddenly the front door blew open all by itself!
To condense a long story, the dead bolt was installed improperly by the previous idiot who lived here. I have been meaning to fix it for an embarrassingly long time, but procrastination kept getting in my way.
The door-opening incident has inspired me to put the dead bolt on my lengthy ''To Do'' list.

Fortunately the lock on the doorknob works, and I barricaded the door with a chair.
During my five-and-a-half years in Tennessee I never felt wind this strong. A wooden ladder blew off the back porch and a metal chair soared off the front porch. Heavy things kept hitting the roof, which inspired my Gothic imagination.

I always worry about those tall trees that I like so much. They are only about twenty feet away from my bedroom. If they ever topple over, I'll be toast.

Since I'm surrounded by a forest, I could be pelted by trees from any direction. The thought curdles my blood during high winds.

In a cowardly attempt to ignor the foul weather, I crawled into bed and started to watch the old movie Easter Parade. Judy Garland didn't even finish singing her first song when the lights went out.

The power outage happened just at dusk. It was going to be one helluva long night.

Admittedly, I'm very ill-prepared for these nasty flukes of nature. I have oil lamps but no oil. I have transistor radios but no batteries. I don't know where the heck the battery for my laptop is.    
I have one feeble flashlight and a few candles.

It's almost impossible to describe how dark it is out here in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Blacker than the darkest shade of black.
The wind raged with sinister screams,  rain poured relentlessly. Unknown things outside kept banging and crashing. 

The thought that it was about ten hours until dawn inspired me to do a search with my feeble flashlight - looking for ANY item that might connect me with the outside world.

I found an old transistor radio in a drawer. Batteryless, of course.

A long extension of my search finally yielded an ancient cassette player that fortuitously had batteries in it.

Aside:
I don't often get to use the word "fortuitously".

By the feeble light of the flashlight, I transferred the batteries from the cassette player to the radio.
They worked!
Sort of.

The radio is lousy...and the radio reception out here in the Tennessee Boonies is far beyond appalling.

I could only pick up jumbled fragments of distant stations, undecipherable smatterings of words and music - - all sandwiched between rude, jarring static.

Note:
Is this blog post getting too long? Relax. You won't find this quality of free entertainment anywhere else.

To make matters worse, the only way the radio would work at all was if I put one hand on the station dial, put my other hand on top of the antenna, and pointed the radio toward the east.


(no, I am NOT exaggerating or kidding)

So I crawled into bed (accompanied by my two timid cats) with my feeble flashlight and the exasperating radio.

And all through the black night I kept one hand on the dial, the other hand atop the antenna, with the radio pointing east.

I managed to pick up a hillbilly station that was playing extremely morbid Gospel music about dying and going to Heaven, which I suppose was a redneck version of Easter joy.
One agonizing song after another - with no commercials or breaks whatsoever.

After about the forty-fifth song, I moved along and FINALLY found a station from the local town (which, from where I  live, is about a zillion miles away). 

At around 3:00 a.m. they finally gave a weather report: high winds, flash floods, but no tornadoes.
Three thousand people were without power (that's about the entire county) and dozens of trees were uprooted. 

There were uprooted trees on the street where my cousin lives (she lives near town).

By dawn, the wind started to abate and I was exhausted. I fell asleep.
When I woke up, the power was back on and there was no discernible damage outside. 

Thank God for small favors.
And unnecessarily long blog posts.