The Tower card, a teeny earthquake and a tiny Tornado

Photo by Ralph W. lambrecht on Pexels.com

2011

One Friday at my home in the UK, I was conferring with my cards for comments or advice about Il Matrimonio’s imminent work trip to Boston, and I drew The Tower card, pride of place.

The Tower from The Golden Tarot by Kat Black.

The Tower card signifies upheavals, shocks, crises, falls, collisions, accidents….pride before a fall, miscommunications, The Tower of Babel. A house of cards collapses, figuratively or literally.

The Tower may also refer simply to a Tuesday, or to the weather or other natural events, including seismic and volcanic activity.

Surrounding cards suggested a key weather event attached to Il Matrimonio’s Boston trip.

‘You need to pack your raincoat,’ I said to Il Matrimonio. ‘There’s going to be rain. Maybe storms.’

Perhaps I drew The Knight of Swords nearby, and maybe the Pages of Cups or Swords…cards which could add up to a picture of sudden winds and rain or snow.

‘There is not,’ he said. ‘You’re wrong, you mad bat, you and your cards. Not at this time of year. In Florida maybe. Not in Boston. The weather forecast for next week says 70 odd degrees.’

Actually, though Il Matrimonio is very knowledgeable on matters of geography, and more widely travelled than me, September is hurricane season after all, even if Boston is not often hit.

‘Suit yourself, you stubborn old thick-head, ‘ I said. (One is impervious to a sneer about one’s Tarot. One needs a thick skin in this line of activity, and to be ready to dish it out with the best, and he confers with me about finances, and has not been let down yet, so you’d think he might be more receptive, or just curious, but that’s folk for you) ‘Because I’m seeing it will rain, big style, and even if it doesn’t, it’s a blooming long way to travel without even a raincoat, in September. That’s just common sense, but if you want to behave like a delta brain, you’ve been warned. The Tower’s saying ‘storm.”

Storm indeed. It came next morning around 8 AM. First there was thunder and a downpour. Then we only had a TORNADO.

A twister. It followed the thunder, screaming down our road like a banshee. I’ve never heard anything like it….a great scream of sound.

Down went a neighbours wall. Wheee! crash! went sundry dustbins and garden furniture, and somewhere a cat yowled in terror, and we hoped it wasn’t under the neighbour’s wall (it wasn’t, though maybe it got carried aloft and blown to Fleetwood or Thornton Cleveley.

A tiny twister, being British. It hit no more than half a dozen roads. Extravagance is so vulgar, don’t you think? And I do not want to encounter any twister bigger than tiny.

But what about his trip? Il Matrimonio loved Boston and it was great weather.

Beautiful golden sunshine and a hint of crispness in the air. Except that was, for his one free day, poor soul, when he went whale watching on a boat trip out of the harbour, and it was a bit rough, and a Japanese tourist was very sick and threw up on deck, and later on Il Matrimonio thought he saw a fin and something black might have been moving just beneath the surface, possibly a whale, which only one other person spotted, and he was quite pleased about that.

It rained hard all day, he said, and he was so glad he had ignored the weather forecasts and decided to pack his raincoat after all.

2008

One night I dreamed there was an earthquake at the end of my road, and that I was trying to leap a gap that opened up on the pavement. A week later, I had a peculiar day, hard to describe, except to say I was vaguely unsettled, prowling as it were, like a sheep watching out for a wolf. At bed time I double-checked the doors were locked, and the side-gate.

Il Matrimonio was away, it was just me and my fourteen year old daughter at home, her bedroom the other side of my bedroom wall.

Something woke. First of all, a feeling of unaccountable dread and oppression, as if something malign, some hostile entity had entered the room and crept under my bed. Then there was an extraordinary noise through the wall, as if my daughter was pushing her wardrobe across the room, and I shouted to her, what the hell was she doing and got no reply.

I couldn’t just leap out of bed and go to find out, getting out of bed and into a wheelchair was a bit of a manoeuvre, but then furniture started shifting, deeply creepy, and the feeling was so peculiar I thought the bed really might start levitating, true horror film style, when things went quiet again.

My daughter came padding through, ‘what was that?’ she said, ‘that was really scary,’ and climbed in with me.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said, ‘a bit of subsidence.’

Our house was built on sand, literally, with sand down in the foundations.

It was the Market Rasen earthquake and the tremors had reached us, travelling east to west across England, all the way to the Lancashire coast. skirting the rock of the southern Pennines.

Wiki- The 2008 Market Rasen earthquake occurred at 00:56:47.8s GMT on 27 February 2008. According to the British Geological Survey the earthquake registered a reading of 5.2 on the Richter scale, with its epicentre 2.5 miles (4 km) north of Market Rasen and 15 miles (24 km) south-west of Grimsby.