The month of April is a very busy time..down on the farm. During my High School years in the 60’s….this was a particularly busy time for me. My brothers were off fighting a war in far away VietNam. Our farm was expanding and the work never seemed to end.On this particlular day, I had left school early with permission to come home to work on the farm. By mid afternoon, I was moving accross the field on the old IH tractor, discing stocks and trying to outrun the cloud of dust I was kicking up. There is a kind of intoxication that comes from riding a tractor …… tilling the soil….on an IL spring day. The intensity of the sights and the sounds and the smells can overwhelm all other sense of being.

I honestly never noticed the threatening gray green clouds that rolled in. Then, the wind shifted..I found myself choking in my own cloud of dust….the dust that should have been blowing the other way….At that point I noticed the storm. Growing up in IL….you become familiar with thunder storms and the occasional tornado. By this point in my life, I had seen a handful of small tornados dipping from the sky…..but I had never been so close as I was that day…to any kind of killer storm.

The rain was beginning to fall by the time I raised my disc and headed the tractor toward home. Minutes later as I bounced into the barn lot and parked the tractor….I could see a solid curtain of rain charging towards me from the southwest. The clouds boiled and rolled and appeared as tho’ you could reach out and touch them. I jumped off the tractor and headed for the house in a full run. My older sister was there to open the door for me as I just beat the drenching rain to the house. She worriedly informed me that there were tornado warnings for R.I. county and that Mom and Dad were both gone.

I stood at the screen door smelling the air and watching the storm scream into our barn yard. As I turned to tell my sister we better head for the cellar…..Mom whipped into the yard in the old Ford Galaxy. She was pushed along by the wind as she moved quickly from the car to the house. As she stepped into the house, I could hear her prayer. With great boldness and resolve, I heard her command the storm to spare this house and to protect each member of her family.

Before we could move to the cellar….the full fury of the storm hit. The high pitched sound of a freight train moving thru our yard…rattled the windows. Seconds later, we watched the ancient Elm tree twist and turn and rise…then fall directly down the center line of the Ford car Mom had just parked. We watched as a giant, flourescent dust cloud enveloped first the Barn, then the grainery…then the entire barnyard and all the livestock buildings. Time seemed to freeze…..strange groaning and creaking and wailing sounds joined the deafening freight train screaming all around.

Just that quickly…it was over. The dust began to settle around the foundations of what was ….seconds before, our farmstead. 150 year old trees were forever gone. Every building on our farm was gone……but the house stood tall. No broken windows…no missing shingles…..and no harm to any of the Family of Frances Frieden….on that day.

A most beautiful heavy wet snow buried the remains of our farm that late afternoon and evening. For the moment, it almost made the destruction grotesquely beautiful. During the following weeks and months, we rebuilt the farmstead. We added buildings and features that vastly improved our hog operations and set the stage for several years of very profitable farming for the Frieden Clan…..beauty out of ashes….but my Mother is to this day ..haunted by her prayer on that day….often I have heard her rhetorically ask….why didn’t I pray that the tornado would lift and totally miss our farm……but then on reflection….she answers with wisdom….God made a way…he is faithful!