Lived Through This
From Nashville, With Love
A tornado decimated our town. Now, we’re fighting a pandemic.
Imagine for a second that you wake up one morning and your neighborhood has been destroyed. Houses flattened, trees vanished. The bars are gone or at least shuttered, as are the restaurants; your chiropractor and your yoga studio and the fancy wine shop and the pizza place and the hardware store and the plant shop and the liquor store and the rock clubs and the pet food store and the art supply store and the tea house are, too.
You can’t get to the dog park because the roads are blocked with fallen limbs and telephone poles, and the streets between you and your friends’ houses— the ones still standing—are barricaded by police; schools and day cares are closed because they are no longer safe for kids; it would take you an hour and a half to get to work, if you felt like it was safe to try. Helicopters and sirens echo in the distance; the phone dings constantly with messages from people who live in other cities and countries checking in to see if you’re okay. You’re pretty sure you are, but you’re not sure if or when or how things will ever return to normal.
That’s been life in East Nashville since the tornado came through in the midnight hours of March 3. That’s been life in Germantown, North Nashville, Donelson, Hermitage, Mt. Juliet, and Cookeville. This wallop of a disaster came through and blew it all away—homes, churches, every business listed above and lots more than that. We’ve been wandering around in the rubble looking for some way to help ever since. The majority of people who came to help two weeks ago just showed up without being asked. By the time the official helpers came, it felt like there was almost nothing left for them to do.
Our city, in this moment when we needed only to come together, now has to stay apart.
And if we didn’t have a chainsaw or a backhoe or a big truck or a crew of roofers or any applicable physical skills at all, we didn’t wait for instructions — we wandered around outside the rubble trying to do everything we could. We donated our own money and collected money from friends and delivered supplies to relief centers and stood…
