When I was catching up with Donna Sue Smithhisler earlier this year, four years after a tornado decimated the family home in rural Harper County, she told me she and her husband, Dan, were doing well.
“We’re just fine,” she assured me. But then she confessed, “It’s spring again, and it’s freaking me out.”
During tornado season, she said, she leaves nothing to chance.
“I don’t even leave town if there’s a cloud in the sky. I have to stick close to home. And if the wind comes up…my, my.”
I understand her reaction completely. It’s how I felt for years after a tornado struck our family farm when I was 4. Cloudy skies sent shivers down my spine. I was ready to run to the basement at a moment’s notice.
Less than a month after the massive tornado struck Haysville, Wichita, McConnell Air Force Base and Andover on April 26, 1991, I was sent to Andover to talk to folks about their reaction as another tornado following almost exactly the same track was reported in Sedgwick County. It wasn’t easy to find people to interview, because they had dashed to their basements – and stayed there even though the tornado dissipated long before it reached the Butler County town.
Over time, I talked to countless tornado survivors who told me the first thing they wanted to make sure their new home had was a basement. Time has hopefully softened their reactions from fear to awareness of the need to always be prepared.
It’s an integral part of the journey toward healing that survivors of the Greensburg tornado are now making…and one to which residents of Chapman, Soldier and Manhattan will be introduced next spring, when the combination of warm weather, cloudy skies and a brisk Kansas wind will awaken memories they’d just as soon let sleep.