Our daughter, Staci is getting induced tomorrow morning. She will be having a baby girl.
I just realized that it will be May 18th tomorrow - the anniversary of Mt St. Helen's blowing
it's top! And the 30th Anniversary at that!
Well, I just told her about it and of course, it doesn't really mean that much to her. She wasn't
even alive when that happened.
But I can vividly remember that day. I was 8 months pregnant with her brother, Greg.
It was a Sunday and we were in church. I remember the whole congregation walking outside
to look at the big black cloud that was climbing into the sky.
We lived only 40 miles to the west of Mt. St. Helen's at the time and most of our family lived
at least 180 miles or so to the East of it. It was funny that it didn't affect us as much as our family
and friends that lived in the Columbia Basin and the Yakima Valley. I guess the wind was blowing
it over their way. Most of the ash came down on
them. Their day turned into night. So they thought that if they were getting so much of this ash coming
down on them - we must be wiped off the map!! My parents and other family members tried calling us
- but the lines were down. At the end of the day, my mother finally got through to me and she was crying.
We didn't even think that it would have affected them that badly. What a crazy time!
We did get some ash come our way - two weeks later. It was enough for us to realize how bad it must
have been for all of our family and friends on the other side of the mountain. What a pain it was to wash
that stuff off of everything. I will never forget that time and the years following. Even 2 to 3 years later -
we would see carloads of people (tourists) come through our little town of Toledo, Washington with surgical masks on their faces. And here we were walking around in this contaminated area with nothing over our faces! How funny.......
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