Lies and Other Acts of Love

Annabelle Storm Chasers

Annabelle

Storm Chasers

My grandmother, Lovey, says that there are two types of people in the world: the kind who flee to the shelters at the first threat of a hurricane, and the kind who wait it out, hovering over their possessions as if their fragile lives offer any protection against a natural mother that can take them out of the world as quickly as she brought them into it.

I come from a long line of the hovering kind.

As I sit across from my grandmother in her stately living room, the dimmed bulbs of the chandeliers reflecting off the scotch that I most certainly will not drink, I laugh as she says, “Well, why wouldn’t I go to the beach?

I’ve ridden out every other hurricane of the last half century there. Haven’t blown away yet.”

Her accent, Southern, proper, moneyed and with that particular Eastern North Carolina flair, is one that you rarely hear anymore. And I would listen to it forever. It is the voice in my head, imparting her wisdom, and I know it will remain so for the rest of my life.

She pushes the stylish bangs of her silver hair, cut increasingly shorter as the years have gone by, and I can’t help but see that glimmer in her eye, the one of her mother, a grand lady whom I met only a handful of times but whose presence is stamped in my memory like the check endorser at my daddy’s office.

It is the same glimmer of my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt, one of those sturdy forces that, during the Second World War, moved with her war correspondent husband.

While the bombs rained down on London every night, she refused to flee or even gather her children into the bomb shelters under the street.

Instead, she bathed her small sons, scrubbed their dinner plates, laid her damp dischcloth over the sink and steeled her jaw against the Germans attempting to take her right to parent as usual.

She sealed her fate by signing every letter to my great-grandmother, “I’ll write you in the morning. ”

My own mom, nearly a foot taller yet lacking those long, thin, graceful features of my grandmother’s, chimes in, “Mother, that is absolutely ridiculous. You will stay right here. There’s nothing you can do if a storm comes, and I’m not going to sit around here wringing my hands that you’re floating down the street in the rushing floodwaters. ”

I smile into my buttery scotch, as my mother has never been one to flee from the storm. At least once a day the city manager she handpicked to advise her on all political dealings will say, Mayor, I suggest you refuse to comment on that matter.

But she, like the women before her, is incapable of turning the other way, of snuggling warmly in the cellar until the tornado passes.

“Have you forgotten who’s the mother and who’s the child here?” Lovey asks.

It is then that I begin to wonder: Am I a storm chaser too? Would I walk to the market in spite of the shrapnel? Now I know. Sometimes it’s best not to ask the questions if you’d rather not learn the answers.