Bad Cyclone

My Mama, Myrtle Buntin Winchester, lived through a terrible cyclone when she was a little girl…guessing around 1916. They all held hands and knelt in a circle, and the storm tweaked the corner of the house just a little bit, but Papa had hewed those big logs himself, and they stood strong through the storm that blew the potato house clean away, and hurt many people on it’s destructive path across Tennessee….

You might think blowing a ‘potato house’ away is a minor thing, but Papa built that too, and it was tall and had double walls with sawdust in between for insulation. Folks paid him to store their sweet potatoes for them…maybe it cured them a bit like you cure meat.  I have a log from under the window of the corner of the house tht got tweaked. It is notched like the big logs at the end are, and I have part of my little cottage collection sitting on the different levels.

Mama said for a long time after the cyclone blew itself out they found weird and strange items laying around .One thing I remember her mentioning was big old baking pans from a bakery far away and they used to sit in them and slide down grassy hillsides. One fellow found a diamond ring at the base of a tree. 2 Red Delicious apple trees, and 2 Yellow Delicious trees alongside Ma’s garden were fully grown and heavily laden with apples. When the storm cleared, only the 2 yellow apple trees stood..The grassy hillside was
thick with apples…

I remember picking apples from those same trees when I was a little girl. Ma allowed us to eat all the apples we wanted if we picked them up off the ground. I can remember selecting a perfect apple after climbing around in the tree, rubbing a bit of dirt into the stem end, and going to Ma and showing her that stem to prove I had not picked it off the
tree. I’m sure she was onto my trick, and probably got a good laugh out of my shenanigans. I was such a scrawny little bugger most of the apples were safe from me, just couldn’t eat enough to make a dent in the harvest from those 2 big trees. I didn’t tell anyone else that trick, because they had tattled on me before .

We loved to hear about that terrible storm , and I remember Mama telling us of a man that was caught out in the open by that same cyclone…She said he wrapped his arms around a young tree and held on till it was over, even though the wind was just whipping his legs against the ground.. Well, believe it or not, that very same day she was telling us this story MANY years later, that fellow drove up to our home. I’d never seen him before or after that.  Jeannie Travis.