Back in 1984 a particularly strong tornado passed through our farm in southern Illinois. Fortunately, we were all safe, but there was quite a bit of damage to the equipment and outbuildings on the farm. As we were cleaning up the wreckage and debris, my cousin, Martin, came upon the most peculiar thing. Sitting in the middle of the vegetable patch was a new carburetor. At first, we thought it must have been carried in from somewhere by the storm, but when we examined it closely, we discovered, to our great astonishment, that it was actually made up of scrap metal and apparently assembled at random by the wind. We could make out part of a bent dinner fork and a wire coat hanger and a scrap of tin foil.

Well, my pa was so impressed that he dragged the stump of an old cottonwood tree that had fallen in the storm up into the middle of the garden and set that carburetor on top like a piece of sculpture. That whole summer, while we were picking beans or hoeing among the beets, we would stop and look at that carburetor on the stump and just be amazed.

The next spring we had both the worst and the best luck any of us had ever heard of. The bad luck was that we got hit twice by twisters, once in mid-June and then again on the third of July. We all got down in the shelter both times, so that was good luck.  But the best good luck was what happened to our carburetor. The first storm snatched it right off the stump and my pa was sure we would never see it again. It was kind of strange how attached my pa had gotten to that piece of metal. We looked high and low, expecting to find it all ruined, if we found it at all.

You may find this hard to believe, but I swear its true. We finally located the carburetor up on the roof of the hog shed and it wasn’t beat up in the least. In fact there was attached to it a hunk of TV antenna from the house down the road, which had lost its roof, and a part of the innards of a refrigerator and you could not tell, except for the Kelvinator label, that it was not a regular glove compartment out of a car. The second tornado that summer carried it down by the creek and left us with the better part of a rear axle and one headlight, all made out of old beer cans and the twisted remains of stock tank.

That’s been nigh on to thirty years ago. My pa passed on in ‘96 but we still keep dragging the thing up to the vegetable garden every time a big wind comes by and carries it off. Each storm spins it around and jumbles a bunch of more junk against it and some of it sticks, I guess, just randomly. Anyway, it’s getting to be pretty big. Next spring we plan on putting some gas in the tank and seeing if it will start up. You see, the storms have tossed together a pretty nice automobile. I think it will probably end up being a 1977 Volvo, probably that nice aqua color they used to make kitchen counters.

I made a telephone call to the state university because I thought they might want to send out a scientist or someone to study the Volvo, but they said they weren’t the least bit interested. Seems only a bumpkin would get excited by such a thing. They said this happens all the time. They said that’s exactly how everything came to be, from stars to starfish; mountains, mosquitoes and mice and you and me, except, of course, we took more time.