Shelter From The Storm
I was listening to Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm as I was headed to the grocery store. The song is loaded with biblical references, but one line stuck with me, ”Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
When I returned home for that first Thanksgiving after I reluctantly went off to military school in the fall of 1963, I felt like I had been in a storm physically and emotionally. However, I also remember that once I walked into the new-to-me home, I felt like all my worries were gone and if there was a storm, I surely had found fine shelter from it.
That fall mother had finally married my father and moved from our modest ranch home in Lewisville, NC, with the attached beauty shop to the much grander house at 347 West Pine Street in Mount Airy, NC, where she had lived in her earlier years while she ran a beauty shop on Main Street. She had also done some nursing for my Grandma Sobotta who died just before her 100th birthday. I believe she had been there for the death of the only child of my father and his first wife. Among her other adventures, she had saved the life of my father’s first wife when she tried to hang herself in the attic. My understanding is that mother was able to cut her down.