When the parents made the children begin cleaning up the house, I began helping. As I cleaned, I realized I was in the loft of one of the barns on the Gallia County Farm. I looked around and saw my brother Chris and my mother also up here. A hard wind seemed to be blowing the barn and when I looked out the window toward the Farmhouse, it looked as if a tornado were coming in. The wind began to blow and howl. I looked at it very closely, because I thought I might be dreaming and I wanted to be sure I wasn't dreaming. I knew that I had had dreams like that before and knew that tornadoes were a theme I had often had in dreams. The more I looked, the more sure I was that I was not dreaming.

I saw the clouds swirling around and they seemed quite beautiful, but I knew I needed to get out of this rickety old barn and go to the basement since the top of that barn could easily be blown away. I started to go down the ladder, but then stopped and said to my mother, "Give me Chris."

She seemed angry that I was leaving and she told me to go on by myself, but then she said, "Well I see you're just going to leave without him."

I took a couple more steps down, but then came back up and said, "No, give him to me."

Someone handed Chris to me and I put him over my right shoulder so his head was hanging over behind me. He moaned and was obviously afraid that I would not be able to hold him. When I grabbed the blue pajamas he was wearing, he said, "Oh Steve, take me, take me now. "

I said, "I've got you baby."

I held on to him as we headed down the ladder together.

Commentary

After Oedipus tore out his eyes, and as recorded in Sophocles' Antigone, he traveled from Thebes to Athens where of all things he had been improbably promised by Apollo to die in a place sacred to the Furies and to be a blessing for the land in which he was buried.