So many things preceded the storm. Things I haven’t mentioned. Things, the details of which seem so unimportant given my retrospective view, which forces me to evaluate what matters and what, ultimately, does not.
The night Tim took his mother’s car, and challenged a friend to a race that ended with a care flight and a fractured vertebra, and which should have ended his life, but didn’t. The St. Patrick’s Day that same year, on which, unsupervised, all three children left the house with the dog to visit a friend, on a night, black as pitch. An innocent driver who was simply taking her family home didn’t see the family pet who ran into traffic striking her as my children looked on with no adult to assist them, save the attending police officer.
