Tales From the Burning Prairie

moar funny pictures

My house is in disarray, figuratively and literally. Soon I will be launching a second blog about my attempts to clean up all the messes that lie before me. The first mess addressed will be the renovation of the second bathroom at The House of The Burning Prairie. I will launch the new blog after finals in December (another mess I’m cleaning up).

Stay tuned for an active link.

It so happened that I was outside with Pumpkin the other day when we heard the tornado sirens go off, startling me momentarily even though I should be used to it by now. As you may know, we live in Tornado Alley and our city has a reliable tornado-siren network. That siren network is tested at high noon every Wednesday, all year long. Whenever I hear that sound I always look to the sky and my mind goes into overdrive, thinking about escape and shelter.

This attitude is drummed into us Okies from our youngest days. My children are already being taught what to do and where to go in a bad storm; it will become as natural to them as it is to me. Poor things have already been stuffed into closets several times, and once under a table in a storeroom at Hubby’s office building. From my earliest days, I recall being woken in the middle of the night and ushered away from windows, knowing that Daddy had kept vigil all night watching Don Woods on KTUL. Then there were the many tornado drills at school, “Duck and Cover” may not help much in a nuclear (btw, I know how to pronounce that) attack, but it’s pretty sound advice for tornadoes. We would huddle on the hall floor in front of the lockers and cover the backs of our necks with our hands.

I love our capricious weather, it’s savage and beautiful. But you have to be vigilant, the thunderstorm that lulls you to sleep can turn in an instant and dump you from your bed. I have seen the whirlwind with my naked eyes, and driven through the devastation after it’s gone. Spring is our most dangerous time but lest we get too complacent, occasionally Mother Nature shakes things up a bit. Tornadoes have touched our state as early as February and as late as November.

One siren triggering the next across the city, they start low and gradually get louder. Soon all the dogs join in, some howling, some barking. The tornado alert is high and steady, and I have heard it too often. This year, a year of high rainfall amounts, after several years of drought and prairie fires, those same sirens sounded a call I had rarely, if ever, heard. The flood alert, which is quite a different sound, goes up and down between two tones, like police cars in Paris.

Either sound is enough to send a chill of fear down the spine, and make me hug my babies tight. Even at high noon on a clear, blue, school day.

Wednesday night we celebrated our 10th Halloween in the House of The Burning Prairie and it was the best one to date. When I was a young girl in this very city, the streets were just thick with kids on Halloween. One parent took trick-or-treat duty, while the other passed out candy at home. We were so into it-decorations on every front window, a new costume every year. Those costumes ranged from the cheap plastic kind with the masks that had the thin elastic strings and the deadly edges to elaborate home-made get-ups. Princess, pirate, gypsy, punk, black cat, vampire, and my all-time favorite: hobo. That was awesome, I raided Dad’s closet and rubbed a charcoal briquette on my face. My best friend did the same; we were about 11 years old and I didn’t trick-or-treat again until high school.

That last year, the one time in high school, was probably a last grasp at a rapidly disappearing childhood. A realization that soon college, then real life would follow with its responsibilities and demands and new kinds of more grown-up fun. That year we waited until dark to get started and stayed out past our bed-times. Despite all the houses sporting decorations, the scariest thing we saw was at a darkened house. There was something eerie about an upstairs window, it was completely open-no screen-and the curtains flapped in the wind outside the house. We never found out why. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t been so monumentally naive; the house bore the hallmarks of a breaking-and-entering. But we didn’t think to tell anyone. Maybe it was just the world’s creepiest Halloween treatment, no one ever mentioned a robbery that night.

You know, I love the big elaborate decorations-the graveyards in flower gardens, the witches and headless horsemen by the front doors, the bats, the skulls, the dismembered body parts decorating trees, the gauzy spectres floating from the eaves. But that open window will always be the creepiest Halloween memory for me.

The first year we lived in our house, we got maybe 5 trick-or-treaters come to the door, even with all my effort. It was such a dismal time for Halloween, the pearl-clutching church ladies had managed to convince nearly everyone of the evils of All Hallows Eve, but you can’t deny kids their desire to dress up, pretend, and score giant hauls of teeth-rotting candy. So the churches had Harvest Festivals, Fall Family Fun Fests, Bible character-themed costume parties. Pathetic. Kids know the real deal when they see it and won’t be satisfied with generic, sanitized rip-offs. In the past couple of years, even my Dad’s church has begun to see the light. While they still sponsor a despicable “Hell House”-type travesty, they began having a Trunk-or-Treat.

For those not in the know, church members park their cars in church or shopping center parking lots, and open the trunks of their cars-filled with candy. It’s a step in the right direction, but still has some overtly religious over-tones. Now, I am not comfortable with taking my small children out to Trick-or-Treat in the neighborhood yet, so we took them to the Farm Shopping Center to celebrate. It was great, there were lots of kids (especially small ones) there and the merchants even dressed up in costume. Then we came home, watched “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”, and passed out candy to the dozens and dozens of kids that came to the door. Monkey enjoyed passing out candy even more than getting it for himself, what a sweetie!

I loved that so many of our neighbors are into Halloween again. And special thanks to the guys across the street who put up a giant graveyard, complete with Grim Reaper and blood-red lights! It would be nice to think that Harvest Festivals and Hell Houses are on their way to the trash heap of trends, but I fear not. But luckily, Halloween is back, at least in my neighborhood.