I’m chopping apples at the kitchen counter, and then I’m a girl with long hair walking across a platform. My class has just entered a working apple barn, and who could have imagined the smell? Sour and sweet, the air itself feels sticky and I think I might stumble over my own surprise at it. The air is sweet with excitement, too, like the farther in we walk on this tour, the closer we are to getting to the meaning of something. In the sour mess, we are in touch with it. Does it matter what “it” is?

Back outside, the apple trees seem quaint in their vitality, compared to all we’ve just inhaled. I zip up my purple windbreaker against the spring with its sunny gusts. I reflexively take deep breaths, trying to steady my senses after the overwhelm of the barn.

The memory still dazes. Last spring I went with my daughter’s class on a visit to an arbor—the same one, maybe?—and I chased and dragged four first graders across muddy paths and playgrounds. We didn’t go into any barns, or any of the new gift shops, or any back room at all. It seemed like a shame to leave without finding that smell again, to walk into a room and wonder how close I was to the heart of something. 

As the children formed their lines to cross the gravel parking lot, like columns of ants on their way, the tornado sirens went off. The bus drivers had been tracking the storm. It was coming down the highway from nearby Syracuse, though the drivers thought maybe it would pass us by to the north before we needed to leave. It didn’t, and here were 81 first-graders, their teachers, and their parent-chaperones, the ones who wondered if they could stay close to the thing if they came on a field trip with their babies. The staff ushered us behind the counter inside the welcome center and into a small theater full of benches. This was not the back room I had had in mind.

A few children cried, but not as many as I might have guessed would. One of them had already been crying, hadn’t stopped crying, since her dad slid down an embankment in the mud and she watched him hit his head. A different type of near-miss, but the dad was okay. 

Most of us were okay. The teachers were champions, and I couldn’t believe how they held my attention along with the children’s. They led “repeat after me” games from the front of the room, stringing together patterns of claps and stomps and arm movements. There’s a universal “right place, right time” sensation I get in my bones sometimes, and it made me feel weightless to get that feeling, to be watching the teachers ply their trade so finely, while another storm approached. How could both be true? That some of these people are meant for some things, but surely none of us are meant to be caught in a storm?

The dad, the one who’d wiped out, still had the slick muddy mess up his back and matted into his thinning hair. His daughter had watched him fall, and that was the worst part of the tornado I’d been in just a few weeks before this one. It wasn’t the damage it did—or the damage it might have done—but watching, and being unable to stop watching, the funnel form. 

“I watched that sucker form,” I kept telling people, finding no other details more pertinent to convey my persistent dread. It was the gut-dropping feeling when that character first enters the frame, the one whose arrival spells change. I believed in the potential of the change. I wrote a note for my husband to find on my phone and titled it “If this is it.”

I was beyond the gut-drop feeling, I was floating somewhere nearby. It’s the feeling when you watch someone starting to fall down a muddy embankment and they are just out of anyone’s reach. It’s the realization that nothing, in fact, is tethered down properly. That the nature of making something new might be sour, that the smell of change might overwhelm. That the babies are okay and the adults are hurting themselves and tomorrow is not promised and who could’ve imagined this smell?

I didn’t ask for such a stormy season—who does?—so I finished my time travel, a swirl of orchards and tornadoes and the heady scent of then versus now, and I chopped the rest of the apples.

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