LITTLE ROCK — Unless you think fishing from your living room window is a good thing, the Mayflower neighborhoods off Paradise Road were anything but last week as the waters of Lake Conway covered yards and lapped against houses that had become literal lakeside homes.
As I drove past one home on Friday afternoon, I spotted a man as he pulled a pressure washer out of a backyard storage hut and rolled it through water that was still ankle deep in his yard.
The scene bespoke the futility of it all for a community that probably will need backhoes and bulldozers to sort it all out.
Without the foggiest notion of what this Mayflower fellow was going to wash with highpressure water, his quixotic mission struck me as sort of like trying to douse hell with a Waterpik.
In light of what a storm survivor had been through in Romance, Mary Jo Gunter and her sister, Reba Post, thought the survivor’s request quite simple and poignant.
Mary Jo and Reba grew up in the White County town, and Reba, after traveling the world as a nurse, returned to Romance years ago to live in a home her parents built.
On the night of April 25, as a tornado knocked over trees and knocked mobile homes around, Reba and 13 other Romantics descended into the storm shelter their father built.
The next day, Mary Jo and her husband traveled from North Little Rock to help Reba and to assess damage.
Pine trees destroyed a mobile home they have kept on their property.
The sisters took a break from cleaning and drove to Highland Circle, where they encountered the woman whose request so struck the sisters.
The woman, her husband and their two sons were taking shelter in the shower when the tornado rolled their tiny home on its side.
After the storm passed, the woman told them, her husband knocked the kitchen sink out, and the family escaped through that hole.
The family had recently purchased the home with tax-refund money and hadn’t bought insurance.
At the moment that Mary Jo and Reba met her, all the woman wanted was iced tea.
“I opened my billfold as my sister talked and folded up what money I had in it and told her to go get some tea. My sister said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have my purse.’ We drove away with tears in our eyes.”
Mary Jo and Reba met the husband a week later as he burned refuse. “In the shower,” Mary Jo says he told them, “they raised up, and it was like an angel or someone had pushed them back down.”
Someone named tammymoffitt has posted video on YouTube that she (I’m guessing she’s a she) says is of the April 25 tornado in Romance. “I took this video while we were sitting in Center Hill (White Co.) Arkansas,” she wrote in the caption.
“A tornado formed inRomance, Arkansas, on top of Joy Mt. around 7pm. We did not see any damage.”
Tammymoffitt’s video is here: tinyurl.com/ romancetwister.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/10/2011