The Purple Shoe Box

Over the past forty years, I’d lived through two blizzards and experienced temperatures far enough below zero to create instant snow from a cup of water thrown into the air. But where the cold and snow merely changed my plans, hurricanes made me fear for my life.

The oak trees that I thought were so welcoming and romantic became menacing and hostile during a fifty mile an hour wind gust. Their limbs like monster’s arms raised and shook high above the earth and screamed at me to “GO HOME, YANKEE,” then snapped back, terrifying in their strength.

So, like any good transplant who had never experienced a hurricane, I downloaded the Weather APP, bought cases of water, and stuffed a purple shoebox with important documents. It was beginning to wear around the edges from sliding it in and out of the closet when the wind blew sideways. I made the kids participate in weekly tornado drills.

School had begun three weeks ago, and they were navigating a new environment too. Rose, my third grader, loved her teachers. My freshman Elana had already made a new friend, Cindy Grace Stricklin. She lived with her mother in a mobile home on twenty acres and smelled like summer. She wore a flannel dress and called me Ma’am. I was thrilled when Elana invited her over after school. I insisted she stay for dinner. 

Before I stirred the pot of rigatoni on the stove, I paused in the living room to look out the window. It had rained most of the day and the sky was prematurely dark, a little windy. I looked to the trees for measure, like flight attendants during turbulence.

 I waved at my neighbor, Mr. Jim. His front porch faced our house. He aimed his red rocking chair at our bare front window, like we were the entertainment.

 He knew how many hours of the weather channel I had consumed. He nodded when we packed up and drove to Columbia to avoid tropical storm I-forget-the-name, then waved when we returned. I wondered what he thought of us, leaving town at the slightest provocation, running from storms that didn’t so much as blow over a potted plant. 

    At first, I was ashamed to admit the storms scared me, because I was the one who uprooted us for nicer weather in the South. Our family in Pittsburgh paid close attention to the national weather forecast when storms formed in the Atlantic. Their paragraph-long text updates rivaled our local Charleston news coverage.

My father took pictures of his TV screen and sent blurry photos of CNN’s radar map to me like I didn’t have cable. My mother texted videos from FOX News because all other news was fake and somehow Anderson Cooper had brainwashed my father. As far back as I could remember, my parents stockpiled Iron City beer, Isaly’s chipped ham, and rock salt when the first hint of snow dusted the city steps. I guess weather preparation was in my genes. 

I stirred the boiling pasta. It was just about – EEEE!     EEEE!

My phone screamed an emergency alert. I dropped the wooden spoon, ran out of the kitchen and banged into my husband coming home from work.

“Get in position!” I screamed and pushed him aside. “This is NOT a drill!” I shouted over my shoulder. Rose closed the doors, I grabbed the purple box, and Elana apologized to her new friend.

We assumed our positions in the bathroom. I got on the floor with my knees against the sink clutching the box to my chest like a newborn. Elana crouched next to me; Rose curled up in the tub with her stuffed dog. And because she was our guest, Cindy Grace got to sit on the toilet.

 Nathan stood out in the kitchen. “The leaves on the trees are hardly moving,” he reported. Smartass.

 I shook my head and told the girls we were staying right here.

“Do you want me to drain the pasta?” Nathan yelled from the kitchen.

It infuriated me that he did not take my drills or tornado warnings seriously but, he was in the kitchen. I laid across Elana, put my face sideways to the linoleum floor and yelled through the crack under the door, “Yeah! The colander is in the cupboard!”

“Which cupboard?” he asked.

“The lower left” I screamed back. I sat up and fixed my glasses, repositioning the box in my lap. Elana narrowed her disapproving teenage eyes at me and crossed her arms. I feigned a smile at Cindy Grace perched on the commode. 

“I’ll bet your family does this kind of thing too,” I said with a chuckle and made circles on the box top to busy my fingers.

“No, Ma’am. We ain’t never done nothing like this before.”

I pictured future Elana recalling this repressed memory to her therapist. I tried to smooth the situation.

“Yes, but I’m sure you have a safe place.”

“Yes, Ma’am but it’s not on the toilet,” Cindy Grace replied curtly.

I was truly curious about where people who lived in mobile homes went during severe weather, so I started to ask, but left it when I felt my daughter’s scathing stare. Then the sirens blared, and everything went black.

The girls screamed. Then came a thunderous, violent metal on metal crash and the kitchen smoke alarm went off. Rose admitted in my ear that she was scared. Elana huddled close. She allowed her frightened teenage self to need me under the cover of darkness. Poor Cindy Grace, I thought. The girl downplayed how scared she was by pretending not to be phased at all.

The smoke alarm was unnerving. Why hadn’t Nathan poked it with the broom handle to turn it off yet? I worried and cursed him at the same time for not being in here with us. Wait, what if lightning struck and the house was on fire?

“Everybody outside!” I shouted over the shrieking alarm. The kids didn’t wait. As a matter of fact, Cindy Grace was the first one out of the powder room, a new record.

 I stood up way too fast and my head throbbed in time with my blood pumping pulse. Whoosh, whoosh in my ears. The actual pressure of my blood pumping and flowing through my ventricles like the Atlantic bursting through portholes and rushing down the hallways of the Titanic. I smelled burning garlic. Was I having a heart attack? My left arm tingled, but I convinced myself it was the result of holding the box too tight.

When I was certain I wasn’t in cardiac arrest, I pulled my t-shirt collar up over my nose to avoid smoke inhalation and ran full stride out the front door with the purple box tucked under my arm. 

The sky had cleared to a sunlit, perfect shade of blue; the kind of sky a kindergartener would color with an aptly named crayon. Not a storm cloud in sight. I turned toward the house, anticipating a cartoon-like scene of black smoke billowing from sad windows and a frowning door while the smoke alarm cried out loud. Instead, I watched as Nathan banged a metal spatula against my good cookie sheet and scraped burnt crumbs into the meager flower bed of beige gladiolas. The sound drove Mr. Jim’s hound dog into a howling fit.

“Burned the garlic bread,” Nathan shouted over the noise when he realized we were all standing behind him in the front yard. “Tripped a breaker too.”

I started toward him to salvage what was left of the Teflon-coated baking sheet, but a spindly arm of kudzu wrapped its invasive self around my ankle and took hold. I lost my balance, fell, and spilled the precious contents of the purple box onto the dewy grass. Papers adhered themselves to my wet skin.

“Dammit, Nathan, I thought I was having a heart attack!” I crawled over and fished Nathan’s last year’s W-2s from a puddle of muddy pollen just as a jacked-up Ford F-350 diesel turned into the driveway and its chrome bumper stopped inches short of splitting my forehead in two. I was eye level with a red, white, and blue vanity plate bearing crisscrossing AR-15s. I thought of all the people in town I had crossed lately who may have it out for me, but the list was too long. I raised my arms in surrender, Nathan’s W-2s in my grip and Rose’s birth certificate stuck to my elbow and awaited my fate.

“Put your arms down, Sugar,” a bubbly voice half-giggled out the window, “I wasn’t fixin’ to make you roadkill.” I was surprised to hear a female’s voice. “Even though you’re crawling around the yard like an armadill-a,” she said as her perky frame bounced down from the driver’s seat and landed all simply southern in front of Nathan. She said, “I’m Little Ma, here to round up Cindy Grace.” I stood up and introduced myself and my wide-eyed, open-mouthed, garlic bread-burning husband. She eyed us curiously, noticed the papers littering the front yard and asked over the waning smoke alarm, “Y’all fixin’ to have some northern oddball tradition?”

“What tradition?” I asked.

“Y’all got some weird ones up there, yessir. Like asking a little old hedgehog to tell y’all the weather.”

“Not sure that’s a thing,” I lied and quickly downplayed her dig with a nonchalant shake of my head, no.

Of all the things Pennsylvania was famous for: the Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence, Heinz ketchup, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Gettysburg, Hershey’s chocolate, Andy Warhol, Taylor Swift, Wiz Khalifa, the Amish, The Steelers, The Homestead Grays, The Eagles, Philly Cheesesteak, steel, coal, Rocky Freakin’ Balboa!

Rose snapped me out of it.

“Mom, you know Punxsutawney Phil,” she said emphatically to help jog my memory. “The famous groundhog!” She turned to Little Ma and explained, showing way more affection for a rodent than any eight-year-old should, “When Phil sees his shadow it means six more weeks of winter.”

Little Ma smiled wide. Her dimpled cheeks made her look even younger, like a sassy, know-it-all schoolgirl. I looked back and forth between her and Rose. They were both waiting for me to say something.

“Yes,” I smiled, tight-lipped, “Come to think of it, there is a groundhog. Thank you, Rose, for reminding me. Now go stand over there.” I gave her shoulder a nudge.

“Then what are y’all doing?” She scrutinized a crumpled receipt on the walkway that rolled by like tumbleweed.

“Oh,” I said and pointed to the purple box, “Tornado warning.” She threw her head back and laughed with her hands on her hips like tornado preparedness was the most absurd thing anyone had ever heard of.

“Y’all are supposed to lay in the creek bed,” she said.

I beckoned toward the porch for Elana and Cindy Grace to hurry up and join us before I had the urge to ask about the laying in the creek business and embarrass either of us any further. I said as the high-schoolers approached, “Oh hey, I was just telling your sister—” 

Cindy Grace cut me off and said that wasn’t her sister and climbed into the truck. Little Ma laughed her head off again and said she hoped her daughter wasn’t too much trouble before she spun tires out of our driveway.

“She was her mother?” Nathan asked, still holding a spatula and ruined cookie sheet with a mittened hand. I quickly did the math. I supposed it was biologically possible. I turned to Elana with raised eyebrows. My thirteen-year-old responded matter of fact with a shrug, “Why do you think everyone calls her Little Ma?” 

Everyone? I gathered the rest of the papers off the lawn and put them back in the purple box for something to do while I thought about what to say next. Clearly, I needed to address the topic of teen pregnancy, maybe work in something about diesel emissions and climate change.

I waved over at Mr. Jim who had surely been amused by the day’s events. He raised his glass, gave me a nod, and leaned in like Rodin’s The Thinker.

I had so many questions, but all I could ask was, “Why didn’t she stay for dinner?”

Elana swiped and tapped away at her phone screen, dismissing me.

The silent treatment, of course.

Meanwhile, Rose was a stick of dynamite just waiting to explode, and Elana’s unwillingness to engage detonated her sister’s fuse.

 She skipped toward me and did a cartwheel, “Cindy Grace texted Little Ma and told her that you made us all be in the bathroom together in the dark.”

She landed another cartwheel. “She said you made her sit on the toilet.”

She spun around on a tuft of grass like a gymnast. “She said Daddy drank a whole bunch of beer and almost burned the house down.”

She crab-walked across the lawn toward the sidewalk. “She thinks you’re weird.”

Little Ma thinks I’m weird?

“Well,” I said in an exasperated above-it-all exhale, squishing an unlucky gnat that had landed on my glasses. “She has a ridiculous nickname, a po-dunk vehicle that is sabotaging the planet and thinks tornado preparedness is jumping in a creek!” I shouted and raised my arms toward the heavens.

A meddlesome man on a squeaky bicycle pedaled slowly past our driveway watching as if we were baboons at the zoo. I realized my shameless tirade was on full display in the middle of Hamilton Street.

 I took a breath, pursed my lips, and scanned the yard. “Now one of you reach over into the gladiolas and grab my car title, please.”