SWOOSH...

Well, that's that. In one brief moment, my grandparents house is gone.



Their things are strewn from hell to breakfast.



Amazingly, my Mammaw is fine. Her eyes are black because debris broken her nose, she is black and blue all over and she has stitched up cuts on her finger and eye brow. She heard a "swoosh" and got in the hallway closet. A nice man and his son were driving through the neighborhood and dug her out. You can read all about it here at Clarionledger.com. It was front page news today.



What you can't read about in the newspaper is that the bedroom in the front corner of their house (the one highest in the air now) was known as the boys' room. It was the boys' room because when my grandparents moved into this house 40 plus years ago with their two sons and two daughters, the girls got first choice on the bedrooms. They did not pick that room. This has always baffled me because the boys' room was twice as big as the girls' room. See, my daddy "persuaded" my aunts that they should pick the smaller bedroom because it had floral wallpaper in the closet. That's right, they picked the small room because of the wallpaper in the closet. No, they are not as dumb as this story makes them sound.

Anyway, I always slept in the boys room. My family is very food oriented. Every morning my Mammaw would wake me up with fresh waffles and homemade syrup. It was a perk.

I was sleeping there in 1985 when, in the middle of the night, my grandparents got the call that my uncle had been killed in a car wreck. At this time, my aunt was eight months pregnant with their second child.

I slept in that room in college when I came home to visit during my Papaw's second treatment for colon cancer. It is same bedroom that I caught a cat nap in after I stayed the night at the hospital with Pappaw when the cancer came back for the third time in 2003. Jessica and I slept there one night after we graduated college.

This is the house where I gathered with the rest of my family in the days after my Pappaw died but before we buried him to eat and remember him. That house was the first place I went once I was cleared to drive after John Hinton was born. My Mammaw and I ate Chickfila and stared at him.

I did not go to dig through the rubble with my family this weekend. Somehow, I figured that the Plum would be hard to handle in the debris. So, he and I waited until the work crews-every other member of family-were back at my parents and joined them for more food.

In the morning before they start demolition, I will go to this house one last time to say a prayer and goodbye.

My Mammaw said the worst thing about all of this is that now everyone will know how much stuff she had. She had lots of stuff.

What else is there to say?