Table of Contents
Her Existing Sixteen Journal Entries from April 30 Turned into One Journal Entry
Also by Jeremy Jackson
In Summer
Life at These Speeds
the first part
A Storm
On the last Wednesday of April, 1983, my grandmother went to a funeral. She drove from the farm to Windsor through the early afternoon sunlight, past pastures where the grass was shin high and rising, past full creeks, past newly plowed fields. In town, the last tulips bloomed in front yards and side yards, the sidewalks were swept, and the streets were shaded by leaves that as of a week ago hadn’t even been born. This was spring in Missouri.
She had heard on the radio about the thunderstorms, but there was no sign of them yet. The day was quiet. She walked from the parking lot to the church through a breeze with no hint of threat to it. She was not a nervous woman, nor unfamiliar with the storms of her part of the country. She had lived in western Missouri her whole life, and she didn’t consider changing the course of her day just because storms were near.
That said, when the funeral was over and she had played the last sustained chord on the organ, she headed straight home. Within the course of an hour, the sky had changed. The sun had slipped behind a veil of high clouds so that the day was still bright, but there were no shadows anymore. She drove west, and once she left the trees and houses of town she could see the storm clouds in front of her. They were close.
Really, it was a race. She was on a collision course with the storms, and it was simply a matter of who would reach the farm first. The clouds that were approaching were not pleasant clouds. They were black and moving
