Bluestone Luck.(Brief Article)

Cutler writes for Nerve and The Nation.

Most weekends from April though December, come rain, shine or global warming, my husband and I leave the world's favorite terrorist target-- Manhattan--and retreat to an obscure little village upstate that I'll call Bluestone. This past year we missed only once, and on that very weekend a freak tornado hit. The roaring wind funnel hopped and stomped through our hills like a child's storybook bear, overturning trailers and sheds in a whimsically erratic fashion, slapping roofs to the ground as if swatting at honeybees and knocking over thousands of trees as if they were bird feeders.

Although a number of people, like ourselves, were saddened by the damage, we returned to a large chorus of surprisingly jubilant townspeople. "You're lucky you were away," these good folk unanimously agreed. Lucky? I couldn't help but notice that the tornado had thrown half of a tall white pine onto our roof, denting a new ceiling and smashing an antique glass light onto a newly (and now not so nicely) varnished bedroom floor. "Well, you're lucky the tree missed that skylight on the porch," our neighbors explained.

Soon I was also urged to enthuse about the other half of the tree, which had fallen in front of our house. More luck. It missed my car. "It could have been so much worse!" they insisted. Well, yes. It could have fallen on our heads. Or mashed us to tomato paste from the knees down. "I can't get over how lucky we were that nobody here was killed," said one flushed housewife, profusely thanking her deity for his restraint after clear-cutting the hill opposite her home. I, too, was glad the tornado killed nobody. But it's the least I'd expect from a merciful god, not a special treat.

Anyway, our torrential good luck continued. I was recently working in my home office, trying to ignore the roofers as they repaired the tornado damage ("luckily," we were insured), when a cascade of crashes and thunks broke my trance. Sounds like more of that fantastic Bluestone luck, I thought. And, sure enough, I walked out onto the porch and, well--remember that skylight we were so lucky that the tree didn't hit? It was lying all over the porch, intertwined romantically with the bundle of shingles that had plunged through it when the roofer's support had broken. To my left was an annoying six-foot-high woodpile, whose proximity to our porch forces you to walk under dripping eaves. But now, it turns ...