1966 a Tornado Hits The Neighborhood

     It was nice to have a new house, mom and dad, had a small room upstairs and then there was a really large bedroom up stairs as well, in the front of the house. Barb, Carol, Tammy and I shared that room and Lori was in with mom and dad. In between there was a large bathroom.
     When you walked in from the porch there was a living room a formal dining room with a closet next to a small built in buffet. In the closet was a secret small hiding spot with a door. Barb and I found that right away. We loved to hide there until Barb locked me in one day. It was scary as heck, you never know what kind of bugs were there, mainly spiders.
   The kitchen was pretty big and there was a small mud room off the kitchen.The basement was a crawl space with an area big enough to stand up in that was about 6'x10' maybe, and then it was just big enough to crawl under the house to fix thing if you were brave enough. It was all dirt.
  There was a bedroom off the dining room, Tim got that room, with a small bathroom off to the back. 
  The backyard was a nice size and we didn't have to be watched all the time and we could walk around the block and not have to worry about "old bums with chains".
    That summer another family moved in down the block. There were 2 teenage  boys and a girl. The girl became one of my best friends for awhile, Blanche. We played school and dug through her closet all the time to find shorts her mom would pack away.Her grandmother would come and stay with her, she was a Norwegian woman who spoke mostly Norwegian and she was so funny. I had never heard anyone talk like that before. Blanche would tease her to make her scold us so we could laugh at her.
   If Blanche had sandals that were broken "Grandma Mithun" would sew them back together.
   It made me miss my grandma who had, passed away, Actually they both had by then.
   I never had a best friend before. Well my cousin Debbie was the closet thing to a best friend I had.
   Blanche was 1 1/2 years older than me and was 1 year younger than Barb. Sometimes we all hung out together and played school and other things.Once we were jumping on cars that needed to be worked on, there must have been at least 5 of them in her backyard. We had so much fun until I cut the inside of my thigh, well actually took a gouge out of it. Marion, Blanche's mom put a butterfly on it after I begged her not to tell my mom.Had she told her I wouldn't be able to go to her house anymore, because she told Barb and I not to mess with the cars, our theory was she didn't tell us we couldn't play tag on them or jump from one to another.
   A couple of days later we heard sirens, a storm was moving in and we were all told to go to our basements, we didn't have one. Well, one that was worth trying to go into.
   So we hid in the back room.Tim was trying to keep us girls quiet, we were scared. There was a loud sound, like a train was coming down the street and then it was quiet. At the end of the block were railroad tracks. So we knew what they sounded like. When the rain came again mom and dad told us we could come out of hiding. And because it was late and there was no electricity we had to go to bed. In the morning we couldn't wait to check out the neighborhood. Lights were back on, the TV said there was a tornado that hit..it had knocked down a tree in the front of our house along with a few others in the neighborhood. Our friends house that had just been built, had a tree fall on it.
   Under the train bridge it was so flooded that we helped push cars out. Timmy made lots of money helping people. The worst thing was down near the railroad bridge, an electrician was working on the wires and he had accidentally touched something and he was killed. His whole body that we could see was black. I cried.  Barb tried to cover my eyes so I couldn't see him.We ran home and Barb called the police, he had been dead for a little bit.
   A few days later Barb found a cat that didn't have a place to go so she brought it home and asked mom if we could keep it. It was kinda ugly, the poor thing. Mom said yes, after Barb begged a bit more. One night Barb went to the park and I had to stay home. All the kids were in bed, we were waiting for my dad to come home from work. Mom and I were in the dining room playing cards when we heard a really strange noise. It sounded like something gasping for air. "Jeannie go see if Lori is OK!!!". I jumped up to see if it was Lori ,she was about 4 months old or so. "Mom Lori is fine. She's sleeping." So I went back to play my hand. A little while later I thought I heard a noise, so I looked back to see Lori . Nothing. About an hour later we heard a really loud noise and I snuck into the living room and looked in at Lori. There she was with the cat holding her down with his mouth over hers sucking out her air, I screamed for my mom and she ran into the room, she grabbed the cat and threw it towards the door. Barb walked in as it was all going on  my mom screamed, " Get that cat out of here and don't ever let me see it again!!!!"
   Barb picked up the cat and let it go outside," What happened?" she asked when she came back in.
   I told her. I don't think she believed me at first, but when she looked at Lori's face you could see where that cats paws were and teeth marks from  trying to suck the air of of her or was trying to suck the milk off her face from her bottle. She knew the cat had to go.
    We learned a valuable lesson that night.