Everybody has a Stormhouse

I think it's time to seek divine intervention for all the bad weather blowing through the South.

I'm composing a little prayer. It goes like this:

Heavenly Father, please stop tornadoing us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Now that I've said it out loud, I think it might need a little work. Maybe change a word or two. Or just find a better man than me to pray it.

It is the beginning of spring in the south. The first of our four tornado seasons has begun. You didn't know we had four tornado seasons, did you? They are:

• Spring Tornado Season
• Why Are There Tornadoes When It's 100 Degrees Outside Tornado Season
• We Can’t Even Have Damn Thanksgiving Tornado Season
• Christmas/New Year’s Tornado Season

Last week, entire towns in Mississippi were razed. Pieces of people's lives blew up 30,000 feet in the air and fell back to earth somewhere eastward. Twenty-six people were killed.

The biggest storm came through Amory and Smithville, small towns near the state line where naked concrete and new tin roofs trace the damage path of the last big tornado a dozen years before. Some fine praying from somebody caused the funnel to go and spin no more just before it got to my hometown in Alabama. Either way, my people were prepared.

Aunt Frankie called me to say she and that side of the family and basically everyone still living in Bexar were in the community shelter with no power. I had to roust my father from bed, load him up and whisk him to a wheelchair-accessible basement at a friend's house. When we fled the western sky was glowing continuous in shades of white and electric blue, and on our phones and television screens the polygon was red and inclusive.

It seems like my people have been hiding beneath the ground all our lives. My South Mississippi wife, upon seeing the homelands for the first time early in our marriage, noticed it immediately.

“Everybody around here has a shelter,” she said as I drove her around the countryside.

“We call them stormhouses, baby,” I said.

My grandmother somehow managed to get caught up in the 1974 Guin tornado and lived through the outbreak in 2011, no telling how many warnings and big clouds in between. We've all sat by the phone under darkening skies, watching wall clouds roll eerily over the hills and bottoms. Seen the sky painted in shades of sickly green. Felt the cold wind come down from the high places in the atmosphere on hot and humid days.

My people know the face of the storm. And they know the confines of the stormhouse.

It was behind my aunt and uncle’s place, just up the hill out the kitchen window. A cinderblock doorframe and a rotting Z-brace barn door. Damp, sloping steps leading down into the earth. Rocks showing in the chipped and battered concrete slab. An angled piece of black pipe protruding from the cap for air.

It was a place of spiders and cave crickets. Of darkness and slick, black mud. My granny did not fear it. I still do.

As I write this on a Friday afternoon, thousands more are preparing another descent into the safety of the ground. The internet has shown me high-definition footage of a tornado moving through Little Rock, Arkansas. The system is crawling east on a line several hundred miles long, red warning boxes fanning out toward Mississippi and Alabama.

My home way down in Southwest Mississippi will likely miss this round of weather. Thank you, Jesus. Maybe my little prayer is fine like it is.

I hope that, somewhere in North Alabama, some righteous man is praying the same thing.