The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

For Inktober day 22 I did a picture of the tornado that destroyed my mom’s house. She was 10 years old and lived in Ruskin Heights. The tornado was an F5 (the biggest possible). I managed to find a picture of the actual storm and decided to paint it because I wrote about her expereience in one of my poems.

The thing that I remember most is 9/11. On 9/11 I was living in Salt Lake City and was going about my normal morning (I hadn’t checked the news). My friend and I went out to eat and nothing was going on at the restaurant so we still had no idea. Finally, around 9am, when we were back at the apartment, my friend’s brother-in-law called and asked if we had seen what was going on. We checked the news online because my TV didn’t get any channels and sure enough, 9/11 was happening. We spent the rest of the day glued to the computer screen. I went out and bought some Bunny ears for the TV and we turned on the news that afternoon and had it going all evening, night and all day the next day.

Other events that stick out to me are Fukushima, Hurricane Katrina, Chernobyl (my parents had the news on for that one and we didn’t drink local milk because of radioactive contamination fears), OJ Simpson’s car chase, and Columbine.