“The biggest and most disastrous moments in a person’s life can be the most defining of a person’s character and a person’s heart.” – David Willard
Butterfly Lady
“Did you have damage from the tornadoes that hit your area on Memorial Day,” I asked.
“Not this time,” Vicki responded. “We were lucky those nine tornadoes didn’t combine into one super funnel cloud like what happened in Joplin.”
Vicki Bronson then asked, “have you heard of the Butterfly Lady?”
“No,” I said, just before she rehearsed it.
Vicki used to live in Joplin Missouri. She was there when that big tornado came to alter the landscape and lives.
“There’s a monument inspired by the Butterfly Lady in Joplin,” Vicki continued.
A family of five, upon hearing the tornado warning sirens, rushed to their basement seeking shelter. They made it to the basement, mostly.
When the mother looked around the basement she was immediately distraught. The storm was battering their home. They could hear it lifting and tearing the structure above them away. And worse, their youngest son was not in the basement with them!
They couldn’t leave until the storm passed and they couldn’t search for their not-to-be-found son until then either. They hunkered down and prayed. Then in mere moments, a seeming eternity for the freighted family in the basement, the funnel cloud savaged onward. They could leave their refuge.
Once upstairs, with feeble sunshine filtering through clouds in an otherwise dark sky, they saw true devastation. Their house was gone. Everything was gone! And, there was no sign of their son. They were filled with shock, especially when they noticed an unrecognized car sitting near the foundation of their now destroyed house. Surprisingly, that car was completely undamaged!
They cautiously approached the undamaged car while calling-out the name of their son in desperation. They kept calling until they were so close to the car they could touch it, and hear their son’s response from inside the car’s trunk!
After getting him out of the trunk, by hitting a trunk open switch in the cockpit, they asked him how he got into the trunk, as they couldn’t locate a key to the car. That’s when the five-year-old child said, “The Butterfly Lady put me in there, told me I’d be safe and not to worry.”
“The Butterfly Lady?” they queried.
“Yes,” he said. “She was a lady with wings just like a butterfly.”
The boy’s survival, assurance and story inspired the community of Joplin to create “The Butterfly Garden and Overlook.” They regard it as a “sacred place for individuals to work through the pain of grieving and acceptance of the reality of their loss” resulting from the most devastating storm in the town’s history.
The garden’s “penciled” outline of homes represents all homes erased by the storm. There is also a thirty-eight-segment waterfall representing the number of minutes the tornado was on the ground.
David Willard, contributor of a monument in the garden, chiseled in stone, “The biggest and most disastrous moments in a person’s life can be the most defining of a person’s character and a person’s heart.”
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