TORNADO APPROACHES WILBRAHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

Our cabin in Wilbraham, Summer, 2009

Marash Boy left the camp in Wilbraham yesterday, heading for Boston, an hour before the tornado hit; we still don't know if the cabin (pictured above) is still standing; our cabin was salvaged from the remains of the portable schoolhouse in Sixteen Acres, Springfield, Massachusetts, that was downed during the hurricane of 1938. What we do know so far is that the trees are down all along Peak Road leading to the cabin, that our neighbor saw the funnel of the tornado heading up the mountain (our cabin is at the top of Wilbraham Mountain) and grabbed her little dog and ran into her cellar.  If we had been in the cabin (where Marash Boy was until about 3:30 PM yesterday), we would have had no place to go -- the cabin sits on cinder blocks -- no cellar to hide in!  When I asked Marash Boy about it, all he could say was that he hoped the flycatchers would be alright, but that he didn't know how they could survive the winds of a tornado. We had been watching the flycatcher parents over the last week as they fed insects to their newly born babies.

If you look carefully, you can see the tiny heads of the baby flycatchers just over the nest to the right of the porch ledge.

And that's what Marash Boy is praying for . . . the survival of those baby flycatchers! Funny what you think of in moments of crisis.  We have no idea what has happened to our trees (80 acres of them) or our cabin (pictured at the beginning of this post), other than a miracle, of course!