First Day Reflection by Rob Brown

"The tornado came across that hillside and killed that whole family, except for their 4 year-old boy.  I found his little sister laying dead in the pasture, all face down with her blonde curls spread out around her head.  I see that all the time, you shouldn't ever have to see that and I can't help seeing her.  We had to bring her body out in the bucket of the tractor cause we couldn't get nothing else past the debris"

"How did y'all survive?" I asked this as we stood on what had been a heavily wooded hillside, now covered with shattered tress and the remains of a home.

"Me and my wife and the neighbors got in a storm shelter just in time.  The shelter is an old milk truck body we buried in the hillside.  There were nine of us that made it inside.  The wind busted the chain we had holding the door closed and two of us just held on while it roared past us.  You could hear it bearing down after it come across the road.  Thirty-nine miles on the ground and in places a mile wide.  I just keep thinking about that little girl."

Rickie would take us to see the shelter later in the day.  We had spent 4 hours doing chain-saw work on his property, trying to clear debris so he can rebuild.  The shelter is literally a metal box with railroad ties framing the doorway and creating a windbreak.  Perhaps three feet of earth and reinforcing materials create a small hill over the shelter.  On the day of the storm it took hours just to get past the fallen trees and downed power lines that littered the hillside in a maze of shattered wreckage.

Pray for a man who survived a storm only to continually re-live the most brutal moments.