Mule Team Memories
When I took the dogs out last night to relieve themselves before bed, my nose was greeted by the delicious acrid scent of freshly cut pine. A tree’s down, I thought, looking up into the starry sky, now clear and calm after a storm, taking in one of my favorite smells. No tree-shaped air-freshener, no Mrs. Meyer’s pine-scented soap, no Glade “Pine Wonderland” candle can come close to the real deal.
It turns out a neighbor lost two large loblolly pines. They now rest comfortably on the ground in our yard, where grubs, worms, snakes, rabbits, fungi, lizards, insects, and other forms of life will take up residence. Grateful to have escaped roof damage, I walked around the fallen branches and was quickly transported to childhood, back to a time when a tornado came through Auburn and changed the face of our town completely.
I wish I could tell you the year, but my childhood memory knows no linear paths. We attended school at Lee Academy, which at the time was housed in what I would describe as temporary shelter, a few rows of metal buildings on a hill. This little cluster of classrooms was nothing like the tornado-safe buildings of today’s schools.
On this day in my memory, our mom came to pick us up ahead of a storm. As we drove home, my brother Robert and I stared out the back windshield of our dark green Chevy Impala, watching trees fall against the darkening sky.
At home, Mama rushed us into the house where we sat against an interior wall. We watched as tall pines outside swayed, snapped, and fell to the ground with house-shaking thuds. When it was over we couldn’t wait to go out and see the wreckage. Our parents put the fear of God into us with tales about “live wires” that could snap around like angry snakes and kill us instantly, and we were held hostage inside that night.
In the morning we were allowed to go outside. Robert and I roamed the streets, meeting up with other neighborhood friends. The world was transformed. Yards were unrecognizable; even the skyline had changed. We crawled over downed pine trees, ignoring our mothers’ pleas to stay out of the gleaming yellow sap which inevitably ended up in our hair. Yet even the most fearless of the pack, my own brother, steered far clear of the whipping power lines.
The smell was heavenly, that sharp, fresh scent of pine. Chain saws buzzed, men hollered, and the air tingled with excitement. And then something miraculous happened: a team of mules came clanging through the fallen trees. Their hoofbeats rang like church bells; their leather livery rattled and squeaked with every step. This mule team had arrived on Brookside Drive to clear the debris, to make way for the trucks that could not yet get past the piles of trees.
For two days I hovered by the mule team, enthralled with the animals themselves who patiently let me pet them and rub my cheek against their enormous muzzles, and the men who drove the team with their mysterious commands and grunts. They were all larger than life, and nobody paid me any mind.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe this really happened. We lived in a world of men on the moon, not mule teams. It wasn’t even legal to have a horse in the city limits. And even then, in the days of children and dogs running free and untethered, the idea of my very small self squatting down within inches of a working mule’s hoof, as big as a dinner plate, seems unlikely. Yet there they are, memories of the mule team standing out as a highlight in a magical childhood.
With every tornado since, I’ve revisited that memory. Now, fully adult and keen to the dangers, terrors, and tragedies tornadoes bring, I grapple with the combination of anguish for loss and the thrill of my pine-scented mule team memories.
Mary Dansak is a writer and a retired science education specialist living in Auburn, AL. She can be reached at maryfdansak@gmail.com.
This essay, slightly edited, appeared as a column in The Auburn Villager on 1/19/2023.
