Milk & Maple Cake

Just before the storm, hit, the wind abruptly died and the ocean went dead calm. There was a bitter heaviness to the air, something you could almost taste, and a sense of doom in the gathering clouds. It came on so quickly that we were nearly caught unawares. In minutes the bright summer afternoon was gone, replaced with a darkness that glowed 'round the edges and settled like an impenetrable cloud over The Point.

My grandmother, who still remembered what war was like, sprang into action like a drill sargeant, rounding up Ruthie and I, corraling both nervous dogs and sending us all into the dining room, the only interior space the house had to offer. She settled us into a corner and like a magician, whisked off the damask tablecloth and flung it over us for shelter. In an instant, the world turned completely and smotheringly black.

“Dark ain't gon' hurt you,” she shouted firmly to be heard over the thunder, “Jist stay put!”

Terrified and close to tears, we stayed, holding each other and the dogs tightly.

It was a vicious storm. The walls vibrated with each crash of thunder and we could hear lightning crack like gunfire. At one point, Nana said later, the old candlestick telephone gave a shriek and a hiss and erupted into a shower of sparks.

“Like to stop my heart, that did,” my grandmother confessed, “Damn thing could've set the house afire.”

And then, just as quickly as it had begun, it was over.

By the time Ruthie and I crept out from under the tablecloth, Nana was surveying the damage.

The swing set had been thoroughly uprooted and lay forlornly on it's side. The flag pole was intact but had developed a definite ocean-ward lean and the clothes line was in tatters. One of the double garage doors was off its top hinge and sagging badly but most odd, was the splash of color in the middle of the strawberry patch – Willie Foote's infamous red Radio Flyer wagon, the very vehicle in which he'd soared over the guardrail and into the sea just a few years before – lay upside down and only a little more battered than usual. It's wheels were still spinning lazily.

“I declare,” Nana sighed, “You girls best go rescue that wagon 'fore Wille comes lookin' for it. He's right fond of that old thing. And stop in at Uncle Len's on your way back. 'Pears to me we'll be needin' some carpentry done.”

Ruthie and I, reluctantly but dutifully, righted the wagon, pulled it up the driveway and trudged all the way to Willie's, arguing every step of the way about how much trouble we'd be in if we left it on the side of the road instead of trying to cross the front yard which was always a waist high tangle of snarled up grass and weeds with a life of their own and who knew what slimy creatures living in the underneath. It was well known that not even the Sullivan boys, as brave and reckless a crew as we had, wouldn't cross the yard without their snake boots on so in the end, we decided to set the wagon on the edge of the yard and kick it in a few feet.

“Close enough to trip over,” Ruthie decreed and took a step backwards in case we'd woken anything up.

“Ayuh,” I muttered, keeping a cautious eye on the ditch, “C'mon, let's go back. Nana was makin' a maple cake before the storm. Might be done.”

“Race ya!” she yelled without warning and took off like a shot.

We ran so fast and so hard that we completely forgot about stopping at Uncle Len's and Nana scolded us both for being such flibberty gibbets but then said, never mind, she'd go herself on the way to the post office. We had cold milk and warm maple cake and the storm, like all the ones that had come before, was soon forgotten.