The anniversary of a Texas tornado
This essay about the Dallas tornado outbreak of December 26, 2015 won the Mayborn literary non-fiction essay award and originally appeared in the journal Ten Spurs.
When I came back from Africa, my house was gone.
I knew it wouldn’t be there. From a safe distance, nearly 6,000 miles east of Texas, I had tracked its final moments.When the windows exploded. When the roof ripped off. When the bricks blew away. Google Maps, the National Weather Service, and Twitter helped me piece together a timeline of the destruction as I paced up and down my hotel room on the west coast of Africa.
The Internet told the story of the tornado that destroyed my house. What it could not tell me was if the people inside my house had survived. If my husband, my mother, and my dog were alive.
My mother has had three lives. The first: She is a six-year-old in a village called Motavaracha in northwestern India. She wears a red velvet dress and a shiny black bob cut that she pins away from her face with two golden barrettes. While her friends run in circles, kicking up whorls of red dust in their bare feet, she wears leather slippers, hand-embroidered with thread the color of saffron.
But the games must halt for a moment. My mother has an announcement to make. “I’m moving to England,” she declares, her hand in…
