the floor in the living room and try to ignore the snowy picture that the antenna just couldn ’ t fix , and he would nudge me every time the map of our part of the state would change color and ask me if that mean the tornado was coming for us next . Outside , the wind would blow harder as the sky got darker ; it would get under the siding of our trailer and howl throughout the livingroom . Lights would flicker . The tree in our yard would shake . Then the rain would fall , harder and harder , and we ’ d listen for any sign that it was getting worse , until we had to go to bed .
There were many nights that year when my mother woke us up and made us hunker down in the hallway because it was the only space in our trailer that didn ’ t have a window . I coached my three-year-old brother on what to do from the tornado drills I had practiced in school . Face the wall . Knees tucked in and head tucked under . This was to protect us from flying shards of glass and other bits of destruction . Don ’ t talk . I never fully understood how silence was going to protect us , but we shut up anyway .
At home , it was a different kind of fear . We brought our pillows and blankets into the hallway , sat on the floor and stared at each other , our eyes wide , our mouths closed , and our ears tuned in to the wind crashing up against the side of our trailer , howling , howling , the sky too dark to warn us if the tornado was on its way .
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I knew that if a tornado actually hit our area , all the hunkering and wishful thinking we could muster wouldn ’ t stop the winds from picking up our entire aluminum home off its concrete foundation and chucking it into oblivion . Our screams , no doubt , would be lost in the roar of the storm .
Shortly after I was old enough to ride my bike around the trailer park without land-marked boundaries — not that I had ever obeyed them anyway — my parents put me in charge of cruising around to look for the sheets of skirting that we had lost during the storm . Mobile homes sit about two or three feet above the ground to make space for water pipes underneath . Skirting is used to keep out animals and trash , and to make the trailer look less like a trailer a transient home .