Sitting here this morning, a coffee drinking observer, just watching a Thunderstorm ease on by. Old Buck The Collie left to go inside cause he is as afraid of Thunderstorms as my Mother used to be back on the Ozark farm.Mom was raised in Kansas, where the wooly booger storms are born, and she never got over her fear of them. 'Course, the Ozarks is the first stop for the Kansas storms, when they come roaring across the State line, so we had our share of them when I was a kid.
Now, when I was growing up on the farm, there was no such thing as early warning radar on your computer, no television, where the news people did an all night vigil, showing a radar map that could almost pick out your back yard and say, "This hook right here could be the tornado, and it's gonna blow you to Syracuse, New York....or not, depending on whether it is a tornado or just a funny looking thing on the radar screen."
o, we had none of that high tech weather stuff....we had Mama, with her Eagle Eye on the Mountain back of our house, that faced the West...and therefore, the dreaded Kansas Tornado birthin' place. I'll swear, she could hear a rumble of thunder, and hour and a half before a cloud showed up.
First thing she would do is gather up us kids..(not an easy chore, cause I wanted to stay outside and watch a real tornado) and herd us down into the basement of our farm house..(the basement being the sole command to my father, "put me in a basement for the storms, Stanley", when he was building the house). Now, it wasn't just going down in the basement...no, you had to go and stand, along the West wall, because she always said, "We have to stand here, so if a tornado blows the house away, it won't fall on top of us and squash us like a "Betsy Bug". I have studied and searched the rest of my life, and I have never found out what a "Betsy Bug" is. But, they must be some kind of bug that get's squashed a lot, bless their little Betsy bug hearts. What a sad life for a little Betsy bug to have to live, they work hard, trying to raise a family of little Betsy bugs, and, danged if somebody don't come along and squash them. It just ain't fair. I can just see them, at a Betsy bug family reunion, "Well, Uncle Mort and Aunt Sadie didn't make it....they got squashed last Friday!"
Ok, enough Betsy bug sympathy for one day. The storm has passed on by and I am going in to get ready for Church.
Y'all have a good one, and be careful where you step, today, the life you save might be a Betsy bug.
The picture below is in front of the farm house where I grew up, with my brothers Dan and Sam, back in 1952. We had wonderful folks, Big Stan and Ruby Ann, who worked hard to raise us up right. It worked really well on brother Dan and Sam....me, I kinda run off the trail a bunch of times, but good raisin' sticks with you and will bring you back to the straight and narrow in time. stan
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