Last Sunday night, I was alone–Ken was fishing at Kentucky Lake. The weather forecast for a thunder storm that night took my thoughts back to 1967.
October 23, 1966, Ken joined the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department. During the following summer, he and several other new deputies were sent to the university in Carbondale for a six-weeks, basic police school. He drove home on the weekends. After an early lunch Sunday, he would leave our Durand house and again make the trip from one end of the state to the other. It seemed I could count on a rip-roaring storm later that evening.
I’d been afraid of thunder storms for as long as I could remember. I blamed it on the fact that three times I’d lived in a house that had been struck by lightning. It never caused a fire, just damage such as breaking windows. When I was a small child, the first distant roll of thunder or slash of lightning at night woke me and sent me crawling into bed with Mom and Dad. As I grew older, I’d open the door that separated our two bedrooms.
While I was in grade school, I’d checked the encyclopedia Britannica and found the odds that one will be struck by lightning in the U.S. during one’s lifetime are 1 in 15,300. But even those statistics didn’t ease my fear–I thought I might be the one that the lightning was looking for.
After I was married, I didn’t sleep alone–I could curl up next to my husband and feel safe. While he was gone, I didn’t want to pass on my fear to my children. Besides, there wasn’t room in our double bed for our three little ones. I toughed it out, faced my fear week after week and won. Now, I don’t always wake up when it storms.
Have you ever been forced to face one of your fears?