토네이도

이른 아침 커피 점에 가기를 즐긴다. 차분한 마음으로 어제를 돌아보고 새로운 하루를 계획 한다. 커피 향을 마시며 신문을 읽는 건 내가 가지는 작은 행복 중 하나이다. 한 잔의 커피가 잠을 깨워주고 살아있음을 느끼게 한다. 새로운 하루를 시작하는 시간 조용한 마음으로 커피를 마시며 생각할 수 있다는 건 축복이다.

세상에 일어나지 않을 가능성이 있는 일은 아무것도 없다. 잠에서 깨어나지 못하고 세상을 떠나야 할 수 도 있고 폭풍우가 몰아닥쳐 집을 삼켜버릴 수도 있다.

아침신문에 어젯밤 동네 인근에서 일어난 회오리바람(토네이도) 피해에 대해 전하고 있다. 이탈리아인 이민자들이 많이 사는 동네에 토네이도가 불어 닥쳐 지붕이 날아가고 고목이 뿌리 채 뽑혀져 나갔다.

완전히 부서진 집도 있고 지붕만 날아간 집도 있다. 고목나무가 강한 바람에 쓰러지면서 집 주차장에 세워 놓은 차를 덮쳐 납작해져 버렸다. 일이 분 사이 순식간에 일어난 일이다. 토론토는 지형적으로 토네이도가 생길 가능성이 매우 낮으니 안전하다고 큰 소리쳤던 사람들이 좀 머쓱하게 되었다. 

언제 어떤 일이 일어날지 아무도 모른다. 그럼에도 불구하고 우리는 영원히 살 것처럼 욕심을 내곤 한다.  

<World turned upside down>

Everyone tells them they should count their blessings: they re alive, after all.

And yet it's so hard, to stand outside homes that have been their sanctuary for three decades, where they've safely raised their kids and built their lives, to see them now shorn and broken, and still feel lucky.

"What's inside there," Silvana Baldassarra says with a sigh, "belongs to my heart."

She stands across the street from her crumpled brown brick house on Houston Rd., her dining room open to an ominous grey sky where once a roof had been while part of a chimney now rests on one of her living room couches.

Her husband, Domenic, wants to take her away from this scene of devastation, but she can't seem to leave.

"I want to stay here all the time, just staring at the house. It's a big part of our life right there."

And now it s gone.

HIVE OF ACTIVITY

All around her, her ravaged Woodbridge neighbourhood is a hive of efficient activity: Roofers are behind the yellow police tape gauging the mammoth job ahead; saws are screaming through the afternoon mugginess as uprooted trees are cut and removed, while insurance adjusters in suits gingerly weave their way through an obstacle course of shards of glass, chunks of cinder blocks, torn roof shingles and even a yellow oven flung onto a front lawn, all the while solemnly scribbling on their clipboards.

Day 3 after Thursday night's tornado left a swath of destruction through Woodbridge, the cleanup has slowly begun. But for those who lived through those harrowing moments of disaster, it seems no amount of repairs can mend their shattered sense of safety.

Baldassarra was alone in her backsplit home, cooking in the basement kitchen, so traditional among Italian families.

Her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren live with them but were going to be out that night, so she was cooking her husband a special dinner for their rare night alone: a fresh rabbit from her uncle, beans and zucchini from her garden and bruschetta with tomatoes she had just picked.

Suddenly the sky turned black and the whole house began to shake as the freight train of a tornado tore through her quiet street.

Baldassarra raced upstairs just in time to see her entire dining room ceiling collapse and her beautiful crystal chandelier shatter with a deafening crash, while a twister of wind picked up a chair and sent it spinning in an angry dance.

In a panic, she ran back to the basement, but she couldn't get out the sliding glass doors. The funnel cloud had swooped up bricks and trees and heavy cement blocks from her neighbour's home and hurled them into her backyard, blocking her way.

After several attempts to escape a house imploding around her, she finally clawed her way through a side door.

It was just a few seconds of terrifying mayhem, but it was more than enough time to destroy a home and splinter a woman's sense of well-being.

"I feel much worse now than when it happened. Then, I was just running out. Today, looking at my house, my mind goes everywhere, to what could have happened. I keep thinking, What if I didn't get out of there?" she explains, her eyes haunted by two nights of nightmares, her frayed nerves calmed only after finally taking some medication.

But she's not alone. Neighbours a few doors down have taken them in and fed them, the local Nino D'Aversa bakery has sent pastries and coffees to bolster their spirits and friends drop by to offer their help.

For now, though, there's not much that can be done.

"The house is a writeoff and will be replaced from scratch," she says in dismay. "Nothing will bring it back; nothing will be the same."

What makes her even more anxious is that she expected to see someone from her insurance company, but there is no one to be found, and without a tarp over her missing roof, she worries the day's rain will ruin whatever could still be salvaged.

The people next door have been more fortunate. Insurance broker Sam Ciccolini is on the scene in his yellow hard hat, ducking back and forth beneath the yellow tape to report back to his clients, Carmella Bancheri and Angelo Genova, whose two neighbouring homes sustained about $500,000 in damages and like Baldassarra's, will have to be torn down and rebuilt.

"This is our time to shine," the broker says brightly. "It's easy to take your money when everything is fine, but now is the time when people need us."

He has reassured the two families that their policies will cover a short-term hotel stay and a longer-term furnished home or apartment rental until their houses are rebuilt.

Ciccolini believes it will take just six months to raze and replace the solid-brick homes, a prediction that sounds too good to be true.

RETRIEVE BELONGINGS

In the meantime, he has told his clients that as soon as work crews can secure their precarious houses, they'll be allowed in to retrieve their valuables.

Anxious to go inside and get her jewelry and clothes, 69-year-old Rosa Geneva waits across the street, staring at her pink dining room open to the sky, her floral curtains hanging askew around windows that no longer have glass.

"I started screaming and never stopped," she recalls on coming up from her basement kitchen to see the roof had caved in on the home she's lived in since 1977.

"I kept screaming and screaming until my sons said I'd have to calm down or they would have to take me to the hospital because I have a heart condition and they got scared."

The screaming has stopped, but the depression has only just begun.

"Everybody's trying to tell me, 'You're lucky, you're still alive,' " says the native Italian in her halting English. "But I feel so bad. This year has been so bad for me: My son had an operation, my husband, so many problems to the family. So in one way I feel lucky, in another, I wonder why everything happens to me."

Baldassarra has had the same thoughts, of the capriciousness of fate that spared the house behind her and the one across the street but left hers in ruins. Still, she realizes there was also good fortune swirling that stormy night as she prepared a special dinner for her husband.

"If I'd been in the kitchen upstairs," she says, "I would have been dead."

(Source: The Sunday Sun. August 23, 2009 page 5, By MICHELE MANDEL)