Touchdown in Sanford

We sit in the buffet restaurant surrounded by plates of bourbon chicken and warm chocolate chip cookies and plastic tumblers filled with sweet tea on ice.  The waiter fills our waters and removes dishes and offers refills and we laugh and joke and eat and poke fun at the man who started this revolting family tradition of bacterial buffets.  The waiter wears a gold stud earring and seems strong and perpetually flexed like a giant celery stalk.  He is friendly - like most everyone we meet in the Carolinas – and I wonder how many tiny colored plates he’s lifted and stacked onto trays and spirited away into the silver walled rooms behind the food troughs. I eat one more cookie.
 
The storm moves toward us and the restaurant lights flicker on and off until the power abruptly goes out like a flame. A busload of middle school kids is en route to the restaurant and I make a wish that we’ll still be here when the madness commences.  The server tells us that they’re out of soda and the food will go bad soon but something tells me the buffet will go on as planned.
 
“A tornado just touched down in Sanford”, reports one server, her ear affixed to a cell phone.
 
We move to the window to watch rain sheet down in the parking lot and lightning strike earth behind big box stores. We snap photos of the murky buffet and watch servers in black aprons pinball their way about the restaurant to jettison jittery nerves.
 
Surrounded by family the past roars back with images of oaky drawers stuffed with emergency candles and needle nosed pliers and duct tape.  The radio spits out staccato reports of dictatorial Nor’easters and hurricanes stretching their spiraled, spidery limbs North into New England touching down here and there with adolescent vengeance.
 
I glance at my scattered pack of a family that now spans a large chunk of the American landscape.  I sense that despite full buffet bellies they each feel the same hunger for adventure brought by the rain and the thunder.    
 
We caravan home in the pouring rain and gather in the living room of the patriarch’s house where we shake umbrellas and towel off and play with little ones on white carpet. For now we are in the eye of the storm and I want to weep at the beauty and the mercy of this life. 

For more information on NC storm recovery: http://www.raleighnc.gov/stormhelp