Risner History Repeats Itself

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I remembered a laid back memory recently after seeing Duane’s house without its roof because of the August 10th derecho that destroyed many things in its path around Keystone, Iowa. In the late 1970’s, my husband Harold, son Duane and I moved into the mobile home in the picture on my parents’ property. That mobile home had belonged to my brother, Bill, when he lived in Kansas and Illinois. He moved back to Belle Plaine and parked the mobile home at my parents. Shortly after that, John Bright, Mom’s father passed away in Belle Plaine and Grandma Veder didn’t want to live alone. Mom asked her to come live in the mobile home. The house my grandparents lived in belonged to their daughter Bonnie. She rented the house after Grandma left. Grandma lived by my parents maybe a year and was ready to move back to the house in Belle Plaine when the renter moved out.

So the mobile home was empty when Harold got a job working for the Iowa Department Of Transportation in the Blairstown shop in the late seventies. In the years that followed I was taking care of 60 sheep and a small herd of milk goats, farrowing 14 sows plus checking on 24 stock cows in calving seasons about a mile and a half north of us. There were cages of rabbits, a flock of chickens, fryers, turkeys, and ducks. We were considered the family zoo when the younger generation visited.

Duane graduated from high school in 1983 and moved to the Amana colonies. He worked at the Ox Yoke Bakery. He’d come home on weekends often and bring us the most delicious rolls and pies that hadn’t sold. I can’t remember the exact date of what I’m going to tell you, but it was the summer of 1984 or 85 on a summer night. Our bedroom was on the east end of the mobile home, the living room kitchen combination was next and down a hall was a small bedroom I used for a sewing room, the bathroom and Duane’s bedroom took up the end.

In the middle of the night, a thunderstorm rolled over us. I’ve always been nervous about storms. Guess it stems from when brother John and I were little near Schell City, Missouri on the farm in what is known as tornado alley. During night storms, Dad would pace from window to window while the lightning lit up the sky. He was looking for a tornado. When the storms were fierce enough to worry Dad, Mom would wake John and me up, wrap a quilt around us and Dad carried John while Mom held my hand as we raced the few feet to the root cellar we called the cave. Dad held the lantern, sizzling when the rain hit the hot globe, so we could see to get down the steps. The lantern-lit the cold dark narrow space between vegetable shelves and potato bins so we could find the wooden bench at the back end. Mom stood beside John and me while Dad stayed in the open door where he could watch the storm until moved on through. Then it was time to go back to bed.

There came a time I had a real reason to be nervous during a late-night storm when we lived in the mobile home. The wind blasted the walls, and the roof made popping noises. The rain came hard, and the thunder boomed with each sharp crack of lightning. Suddenly there was the loud sound of ripping tin. The whole mobile home shook. Harold was thrashing about, trying to get up fast, shaking the bed even worse. I had been more asleep than awake. I asked what happened as I jumped up too. Harold didn’t know so he reached around the doorway to flip the light switch for the kitchen. The light and shade were dangling from the electric wiring a few inches from the tabletop. We walked to the hallway and with a flashlight could see a tree laying on its side taking up the hall to the bathroom door. Well, at the time, it looked to us like a whole tree. Actually, it was one large branch on the ancient maple tree behind the mobile home. As we watched the rain pouring in from the missing roof, I remembered Duane had a large stereo set he prized with speakers and a small television in his room. I knew getting wet wasn’t going to be good for them. So I told Harold to hold the flashlight toward the bedroom door so I could see what I was doing. The tree branch was off the floor because it was resting on Duane’s bed. I made three trips or four trips with what I rescued from the bedroom. There was a piece of the roof over Duane’s things so they were dry. I’d hand each item to Harold and go back for something else. All the while, I was getting wet from the rain filtering through the tree and listening to the rustle of the leaves on the settling branch. When I was done, we moved Duane’s things to the other end of the mobile home. I don’t remember anything else until daylight. If we went back to bed, we surely didn’t rest well. In the morning, we found the ancient maple tree on its side and covering the end of the mobile home.

Thank goodness for neighbors. In no time, the tree was cut up and cleaned out of the way and plans were made to replace the mobile home with the one we lived in until 1993. As I thought back about crawling under the tree in Duane’s room that stormy night, I decided that might not have been a good idea. What if the bed had collapsed from the weight of the tree while I was under it? I then thanked God for his grace and goodness with my next thought. That calamity could have happened on a night when Duane was home sleeping in his bed. For the eighteen years we lived by my parents, every time there was a storm I went over to stay in the house with my parents. Harold would stubbornly stay in his recliner. I was always so sure no storm could get to us in the house. The living room was protected on all sides by rooms. There was only about five feet on the south with a window in it that wasn’t. How wrong was I when August 10, 2020, the roof of that house blew off and the attic floor gave way, dropping whatever was stored in the attic on the living room floor. Again I thank God that Duane and Beverly made it safely out of the house after the storm ended.