Tornadoes are rare in upstate New York. Still, three years ago, on the last day of May, I watched one go past my house. My home was undamaged, and the worst my family suffered was a week without power or running water.

We felt compelled after it was over to go to the fire house in the center of the village to see if we could help. That five mile journey seemed like a ride through one of the disaster reportss we'd seen on the evening news. Trees that had just recently come into full foliage were snapped apart and strewn everywhere. Power lines littered the roads and the sheer capriciousness of the damage the storm had caused was a marvel to everyone.

Over the next few weeks, I drove through the storm's path each day on my way to work, and it was a month or so before I could get past the enormity of it all to see specific images in the devastation. An old pine tree which stood next to the road had been about thirty feet high, and all but six feet of it were gone now. What remained was a bare trunk with sharp splinters at the top a reminder of what had torn it apart.

The sight of that bare trunk rocked me, and I had to pull off the road to the shoulder as I started to cry uncontrollably, releasing all of the fear and sorrow that I'd kept prisoner inside me since the day of the storm without even realizing it.

During the next year, I watched as that broken pine miraculously began to sprout first tufts of needles, then the short stumps of branches. I had thought the tree surely dead without the needles to capture the power of the sun. But the roots were still intact and could nourish it.

Now, three years later, the splinters have weathered to a sedate gray and the branches that first erupted from the trunk are now pushing out branches of their own. The farmer who owned that land had intended to clear out all the broken brush and level it for a new pasture, but I convinced him to leave my broken pine alone.

He wasn't a sensitive man; I'd known him since just after I moved here. He was belligerent and resentful of anyone who hadn't lived here for generations. But he understood as well as I did that the broken pine was something special, and that for both of us it was a lesson about the tenacity of life.

February 17, 2001
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