gives me the opportunity to tell you about how I had just fallen in love with Tuscaloosa, which is through its profusion—[no, don’t explain it. Just say it.] ) It’s my second year in Tuscaloosa Alabama. I do not know why I didn’t notice springtime last year, because it is a true spectacle, in the most specular sense of the word. Fields of crimson clover hug the highways and ripple in the wind and the cherry trees all over campus rain blooms down on everyone all day long and the Magnolias start to sigh open and every morning my street smells like fried eggs and honeysuckle and the wisteria explodes out of chain link fences and old trees and down trellises and the moon is huge and white and utterly beatific—I have not felt so strongly attracted to nature since I left the big skies and red mesas in the Southwest years and years ago. It is springtime and I am in love with Tuscaloosa. I blushed when I told people, over cocktails, as the setting sun burned the sky pink and a warm breeze played in my skirt. My lover’s body on mine while I, giggling and sheepish, recounted how we barely noticed each other when we met. Tuscaloosa and I finally found each other and I was in a bright, hazy dream world with my new lover when what our radio stations have branded “The Tornados of 2011” struck and tore up so many of the things I’d fallen so deeply in love with and spat them out in Georgia. More should be said about the extent of the destruction, the body count that’s still ticking upwards, the stories we have heard about the tornado taking children up into it. But those stories are only just beginning to trickle in. Every day the picture of our ravaged state fills in a little more. I haven’t the strength
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