RINGGOLD – Mothers, sisters and daughters, they’ll gather here today. As they have on past Mother’s Days, the women will celebrate a tie that binds like no other. They kissed the bruises, checked under the bed for monsters; they’re lifetime members in that most prestigious of sororities, the loving order of mom.
On previous gatherings, the mothers came together at a dinner table. They sat in comfort and watched the kids chase each other across the backyard, yelling at them to watch out for the pond.
Not this year. For 57-year-old Jeanie McClure and her extended family, today’s celebration will take place against a backdrop of shattered homes and destroyed countryside. The Catoosa County log house where she and her husband, Steve McClure, 58, raised three children lay in the path of a killer tornado that hit the area hard just 12 days ago.
While the couple cowered in the basement, the tornado shoved their house 7 feet off its foundation. It pushed their fireplace through the floor. Now, the house is a wooden shell where spring winds blow through broken windows. It will be demolished.
Still, here, among the rubble, Jeanie McClure’s family will gather today to have a cookout on a battered grill. It will be a celebration of not just one mother, but many: Jeanie McClure and her sisters, Joan Gill and Karen Crider, found strength in numbers, helping each other raise their children and, in the process, holding each other up, too. For now, Gill and Crider, whose houses weren’t damaged, will hold up Jeanie, doing laundry, bringing food and clothes, assuring her that things will get better.
“Women,” she said late last week, “are the backbone of the family. The backbone of it all.”
The tornado that ruined the McClure home was one of an estimated 305 that came to life across the South in late April, killing more than 300 — eight people in and around Ringgold — and causing at least $2 billion in damage.
The twister also damaged Jeanie McClure, though she hates to admit it. When she looks at the remains of her house, her voice quavers.
“This is home,” she said. “This is where everyone comes.”
A surrogate mom
Jeanie was born first, but barely. Eighteen minutes later, along came her twin, Joan. Four more children would be born into the family of Ralph and Edna Scruggs of Rocky Face, a Whitfield County community 90 miles north of Atlanta.
Jeanie got maternal training early. Her dad died in 1971, so Edna went to work to keep the kids fed and clothed. By the time the youngest, Karen, was born in 1965, Jeanie was practically her second mom.
“A good one, too,” said Karen Crider, 11 years younger than her twin sisters. “She got me up, made sure I got breakfast, got me to the bus.”
It was good preparation for the life Jeanie chose. In 1975, when she was 22, Jeanie Scruggs married a blue-eyed young man she’d known for years. She already had a son, Scott Scruggs, but that was OK with Steve McClure.
In 1979, he got a job with General Motors, which required them to move to Romulus, Mich. By then, they’d had two more children, Eric and Heather.
“We hated it there,” she said. Michigan was cold, so far from the soft green hills they remembered. In Michigan, Jeanie McClure was in a car wreck so serious that her left leg had to be amputated. Now, she walks on crutches.
When he got a chance to transfer to GM’s Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., McClure didn’t hesitate. They bought a 22-acre tract on the eastern edge of Ringgold and hired a crew to build a four-bedroom, three-bath log home on the site.
Thus began a new chapter for Jeanie McClure. Steve would leave Sunday night and make the 160-mile drive to the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, where he’d spend the week. Jeanie was in charge of the kids until Dad came back home Friday night.
In charge, but not alone.
Ring of love
The mother and sisters of Jeanie McClure regularly visited while Steve McClure was away. Her children grew up surrounded by mothers — Grandma Edna, Aunt Joan, Aunt Karen, Aunt Dana.
At times, it was almost too much love, Scott Scruggs said.
“They were always watching me,” said Scruggs, who is 38 and lives in Ringgold.
But there was an upside, too. “I had all sorts of bike wrecks,” said Scruggs, father of two boys, Zach, 17, and Samuel, 7. “There was always someone there to comfort you.”
His sister, Heather Fugatt, remembers getting scolded from all directions whenever she did something wrong. There was always an aunt around, it seemed, to help mama read her the riot act. So was her grandmother, until her death in 2001.
She recalls the happy moments more than the scoldings. “We always enjoyed good family times,” said Fugatt, 31. “We laughed a lot.
“I learned from her how to look after my family,” said Heather Fugatt, who gave birth 18 months ago to her first child, Breella. “She always looked after us.”
Struggling, surviving
One morning last week, the wind cresting the ridge at Cherokee Valley Road was stiff, insistent, carrying smoke and sound in equal measure. Trees burned, chain saws whined; everywhere, people struggled to put a small amount of order back into lives upended in a few moments.
Jeanie McClure struggled, too. She did it quietly, occasionally squeezing the hand of her twin, Joan Gill, or smiling at kid sister Karen. She swept her eyes across the yard where little boys had become young men, where a little girl outgrew dolls. She wiped a tear from her eye, but another took its place.
“Remember?” she asked Joan. “The boys learned to drive that old truck in the yard.”
Joan nodded. It was a Ford, black and battered. “We laughed and laughed.”
Or remember the time a pickup loaded with firewood rolled down the hill? Everyone yelled, but no one stopped it in time. Splash!
“It couldn’t land in the pond in the summer, when it was warm,” said Karen Crider. “Nooo. It was winter. That water was cold!”
It was here, too, where Jeanie confirmed her membership in another large sorority — women who put up with the foibles of their men. He bought a 1950 Farmall Cub tractor, a bright-red thing with bug-eyed headlights, because he liked its looks. It needed work, and he planned to fix it, but, well ...
This past week, Steve, who retired two years ago, sold that cute little machine for about half what he paid for it. His wife shrugged. In the book of life, a greasy tractor is hardly a footnote.
But a tornado? That’s a chapter too fresh to tell without tears.
Sitting in a folding chair, Jeanie seemed to sag under her husband’s oversized jacket. In the distance, six vultures tilted in the sky. Their shadows flickered over a broken forest where children once played army.
“This was such a pretty place,” she said. “Where do you go from here?”
She provided her own answer. She looked at a rosebush, a riot of red petals against a fence. Then she pointed at a Japanese maple, banged around pretty hard when the tornado howled past.
Both had been Mother’s Day presents. Both are firmly rooted in the soil where Jeanie tended her young things. They will survive, she said. She will, too. The McClures will rebuild.
“I can’t let a tornado run me out,” she said. “This is the best place to be a mom.”
So, next year, as on this day, the women will gather again. They’ll swap memories at the dinner table, or maybe yell at the kids and grandkids to be careful. Theirs is a tie no mere tornado can break.
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