Find safe shelter in storm cellar

I preferred to call ours a cave; it suggested a cool, natural place to go for safety from storms. Chub called it a storm cellar. It was well-made, partly in the ground, with sodded earth mounded up over its arched roof. It was plastered inside, with a 3-inch-wide ventilating pipe through the roof and a low spot in the floor on one front corner.

"Cellar way" was the name of the steps and door leading down into the storage area, and some steps were protected by a wooden "house" to repel rain, ice and snow. Most cellars had that low spot in the floor for dipping up the last bit of water that seeped in during rainy times. Our cellar had not been used for many years when we bought the farm. It was a mess. Big canning jars floating or broken, some half-filled with spoiled tomatoes, were standing in water. A few withered carrots, potatoes and other root crops were in dilapidated bins or on shelves above the water level.

After we decided to build our home at the farm, we removed all of the trash and broken glass, siphoned the water out of the cave with long garden hoses, scraped mud off the concrete floor and dipped the last water out of that low place. Sun and wind dried the cellar, and we told Nancy and Walt how people often used these storage places for storm protection.

A storm threatened about noon on a football Saturday in 1958. We decided to have a "dry run" to the cellar to practice in daylight. We ate lunch and moved furniture around, installing the new television in a different place.

The Tigers game was away, so we’d hear it on the battery radio. The sky darkened and lightning threatened, so Chub disconnected the television and said, "OK. We’re going to the storm cellar."

Nancy and Walt ran to get Tinki and put her five Pekingese babies in a basket. Chub pulled other plugs and located the battery-powered radio. I got raincoats on all, and away we went to the storm cellar in a hard rain. The electrical storm had not reached us yet.

We stood in the cave bored. Someone said, "We should have brought folding chairs." Nancy dashed to the house and returned, lugging a child-size chair in each hand.

Then, as my dad would have said, "All hell broke loose in the sky." We couldn’t hear the game for the static, and the storm raged. Water came down in sheets, blowing toward the house. Then the front passed and the rain stopped. All went quiet.

The kids carried the puppies, Chub carried the chairs and I was the first to discover that the living room was like a lake! Throw rugs were soaking wet, and water stood almost to the new television; Nancy had hauled out two chairs but didn’t remember to shut the door!

Perhaps mopping up that mess and drying the rugs kept us from ever using the cave as a storm cellar again.


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