It is a land of farms, of corn and cattle, soybeans, and wheat, in the middle of a state in the middle of a country. People lives their lives as most do, working, going to their children’s ballgames, shopping at area stores, and finally settling into their homes to watch television, until they decide it was time to go to bed. They do this in the safety of their homes, the comfort of surroundings that have become as much a part of their lives as the everyday activity of living.

My brother’s house was on a hill, little more than a rise out of the cornfield that faced his property and modest compared to the mountains in Tennessee. He and his wife were sleeping when the tornado hit. It sounded, he said, like a freight train. A freight train: the tired cliché that is inadequate at best, but when you’re in the middle of a tornado, the only way to describe its approach. The winds beat against his brick ranch house, rain thundering, the mighty power of nature within unnatural circumstances. When he made his way down the hall and into the family room, he felt the icy fingers of cold air wrap around him. Cold air in a house that should have been warm and hospitable. Cold air rushing in through broken windows, and a roof half demolished, in a home that had been for decades, a sanctuary.

The world, his world, their world, was gone. Everything that they knew, how they lived their lives, the immunity granted people, was destroyed.

In a matter of minutes, his life and home were gone. He and his wife were not injured, and that is a consolation. People remarked on it. They were lucky. Thank God no one was injured. Honest platitudes delivered by well-meaning people. Good people. But somehow, they did not feel lucky.

I went with him to the remains of the house, the roof gone, water covering the floor, things that were the talismans of a family’s life, scattered about inside and outside. He wanted to pick some things up, he told me, but when we arrived and daylight revealed the house with a sagging roof and wind-whipped interior, all he could do was make his way from one room to another, stunned, and in the end all we retrieved was a vacuum cleaner. As we left, he locked the door, a habit, but perhaps the height of futility, and silently walked away.

I walked around the outside with my sister, using my phone to record the damage. In the front yard and back yard, trees, broken and twisted, confirmed the storm’s power as if the destruction of the house wasn’t enough. Around the house were the bits and pieces of a life, torn from within the house and scattered about. They, taken from their context, no longer had meaning. They were simply, residue. She found a check, a meaningless slip of paper that had somehow survived and handed it to me.

The storm, 1,600 feet wide, had tracked across the flat land, destroying houses, barns, outbuildings, uprooting trees, overturning vehicles,  and demolishing livelyhoods.f A quarter mile away was a normal landscape of modest, undamaged homes, a reminder that tornados were capricious in their devastation.

It’s been several weeks since the tornado struck and life, as it always does, moved on. People spoke of things returning to normal. House will be removed or repaired, chain saws buzz angrily as the cut up fallen trees. People who had driven by to gawk at the devastation would find other interests.

But for my brother and his wife, this single night challenged their belief in the sanctity of life and the validity of the everyday.  One night in Ohio was a reminder that absolute certainty does not exist, and existence is a matter of fortune.