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May 18, 2005
what do you do when the sun turns blue?
Twenty-five years ago, I went outside our house in Nine Mile Falls, WA and looked at the sky. No, I looked at the sun...and it was blue--a strange electric blue. I'll remember that for the rest of my life, staring straight up at that freaky blue sun. It was about 3PM. Then the strange gray snow started to fall and I had to go back in because we had heard that breathing it in was bad--flecks of glass. There was very little light because the cloud above was so thick and black. We sat on the back of the couch and stared out the window to watch it fall and layer up, turning everything a powdery puffy gray.
We had an early heads up though. We were out weeding the front lawn earlier that morning. On the horizon was a dreadfully ominous storm cloud. I was excited because I really love thunder storms and that cloud looked to be the blackest I had ever seen. My grandmother called--she had heard the monstrous boom that morning at 8:32 AM. She told us to get the cars in the garage and bring the cats in. We spent the next couple hours moving things around in the garage so we could move the cars in before the cloud was upon us. We were so excited and scared at the same time. The cloud was such a mystery and to my 9-year-old imagination it was an incredible adventure, I was sure.
We didn't realize that we would be staying indoors pretty much for the next week. My mom's birthday was the next day so we celebrated with her sans dad--he was stranded in Montana on a sales appointment and couldn't get home because the roads were all closed. It took him two days to get back home to us. When we finally did go out, we had to wear free surgical masks provided by the fire department. School was cancelled for three weeks. I think my mom was ready to kill herself by the end of that time, cooped up in the house with a 9-year-old, 7-year-old and a 5-year-old. Our typically outdoor cats were unhappy. They were stuck in the garage for at least a month. We just didn't want them outside walking around in all that muck.
When my father made it home a few days later, he climbed up and washed the roof off. Something about how it wasn't good to let it sit there and ruin the shingles. I'm not sure why I remember that, but I do. It was strange how it accumlated. For many months, you would travel across the state of Washington and see piles and piles of the powder along the sides of the road, almost like snow but a weird dirty gray color. And I remember that it took well over a year for all the signs to dissipate. For a few years when driving through Ritzville, WA you could see whitish gray smears along the edges of the tarmac.
Best yet, when we went to see my cousin in Twin Falls that summer, who was the same age as me, he implored us to bring jars of it down for him. He put it all in baggies and sold it to his friends for a dollar.
Posted by crystallyn at May 18, 2005 06:28 AM