It's been over six months since the tornado struck my hometown of Joplin, Missouri, and rarely a day goes by that I don't try to make sense of it. It still seems unbelievable, something you see in the movies and on the news but don't actually live through. As painful of an experience as it was, there has been good that has come out of the tragedy. I've searched for this 'good' so that I can move past the horror and devastation. I'm not at the point yet where the good outweighs the bad, I'm not yet grateful it happened.In my quest to give the experience purpose, I've actually tried to accept some blame for the force of nature. In the few months leading up to the twister, I had been living on couches in New York City while I searched for a new apartment. Trying to make light of my situation, I kept joking that I was homeless. I was, but not in the sense of the word where I was living on the streets with a box and a blanket. In April, I decided to move into my friend's apartment when she left it in May. Having found my new place, I headed home to Missouri for some stability, comfort and a real bed. Five days before my mom and I were to drive my things back to New York, the tornado hit taking with it my stability, comfort and bed. Homeless now meant something new entirely. God really must have a sense of humor.
My name is Miranda, and I'm a hoarder. I don't deserve to be on a television show...yet, but I could see it for my future. Hoarding is in my genes, passed down from my parents and their parents. When my cousin, Theresa, and I were cleaning what was left of my parent's bathroom, we made a game of finding the oldest and most obscure item. I think I may have won when I found Avon decorative soap from the '70s. Theresa, among others, made the resolution to clean out her closets more regularly. Speaking of cleaning out closets, my parents had been on me for over a year to clean out the walk-in-closet in my bedroom so that my dad could use it to hoard more of his things. It can get nasty when hoarders collide. I kept putting off the closet cleaning because like any good hoarder I just didn't want to face my problem. Shutting the door to it, or never opening the door to it, rather, was much easier. Well, nature and God with his sense of humor took care of that closet, and once again I felt a bit responsible. Clearly full of myself, I have thought that if I had cleaned out that closet and never joked about being homeless maybe the tornado wouldn't have happened because obviously the tornado only occurred to teach me some valuable lessons about what it really means to be homeless and how I should do what my parents ask even if it means encouraging their own hoarding habits.
As bad as my parents' and my hoarding is/was, my dad's parents' ability to hold onto things really put us to shame. Their time on this earth did give them an unfair advantage, but the things they would keep were unbelievable. Though the house had been ripped to shreds, the basement had been mostly spared. My aunt had found a large stack of church bulletins decades old in a cabinet in the basement because you really never know when you will want to look up who sang a solo on that one Sunday back in May of 1991. My cousin Zach had always remembered our grandmother keeping the white Styrofoam meat trays for reasons unknown to any of us. While he was cleaning up the debris of their house, much to his delight, he found a meat tray.
With all this talk of hoarding, I finally can get to a 'good' that has come of the tornado. Heirlooms. So much was lost or destroyed that day. I try not to think about it because just all the pictures that I will never see again leads me to a fit of tears. The sense of loss is always going to be there, but I had not been expecting to find as much as we did. I've seen more pictures of my grandparents, my dad and my uncle in the past six months than I have my whole life. We have realized that my cousin Josh is a dead ringer for his dad when my uncle Tommy was a junior in high school. Uncle Tommy could put on a dress and pass for his mother, Granny Joe. She was quite the looker and poser. So many pictures of her from before she was a mother show us the woman her husband, Papa Leon, fell in love with. Traveling down this memory lane that we had not even realized was in a back closet of their meat-tray-filled house has made the tragedy of the tornado a little bit easier to swallow.
I've always been a fan of vintage. I scour thrift stores, antique malls and vintage boutiques looking for treasures. I had no idea a jackpot of jewelry and other goodies was sitting two doors away my whole life. My Granny was a much larger woman than any of the other ladies in my family so her clothes and extensive collection of panty hose (not kidding!) didn't interest any of us, but her accessories peaked our interest. A month after the tornado, all the Noland women sat around a table in my aunt Debbie's house dividing up the treasure trove of costume jewelry, scarves and gloves. I came away with items that I never knew existed, but they now remind me of a woman so dear to me. The tornado took a great deal from us all that day, but it gave, too.
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