Couple finds God’s presence in aftermath of May 4
storms
By David Myers
In the cool, dark night of May 4, Steve Hart held his
wife, Mary, tightly in his arms, assuring her that everything would be okay,
that God would watch after them.
Moments later,
with a terrifying roar, their house, like so many others in
“We had gone to the basement with candles and
a flash light,” Steve Hart explained. “It was raining and hailing and then all
the sudden the electricity went out, and a short time later it was all
stillness and quiet. …
“I sat on a chair,
and Mary sat on my lap, and I kept praying out loud. I told her it’s going to
be okay, that God’s going to take care of us. The louder the noise got, the
more she would cry. That was more painful than anything, knowing the pain she
was feeling. I just knew in my heart we would be all right, that we would
survive.
“The first thing
that broke the silence was the cast iron door from the bottom of the chimney
blowing right off the iron framework,” he said. “It was a loud bang, like an
explosion. It flew over and smacked into the wall. Windows started exploding
upstairs. Things started falling down. It took the roof completely away.”
When the couple slowly ventured outside, the
town of
Escaping the
bizarre landscape, the couple found solace back in their basement in a
surprisingly dry bed where they were able to rest until rescue workers arrived.
“Later, firemen
and policemen came and said we had to get out because of the instability of the
house,” Hart said. “They said that another storm could come through and knock
it down. I didn’t care to leave. We couldn’t take anything with us except what
was easy to grab.”
Across the street,
in the basement below of a pile of wood that used to be a two-story Victorian
house, an elderly couple came very close to extending their stay. The owners of
the house were out of town, and the elderly couple, who had no basement, had
gone to their neighbor’s basement to sit out the storm. When rescue workers
asked if anyone was there, most thought that they were out of town.
“There were six or
seven firemen,” Hart said. “They asked if anyone was in the house. The
neighbors said they assumed no one was in the home. I said, ‘Yes; I think
there’s a couple in the basement.’ They said they better check it out. In a few
minutes out they came.”
The group was
taken to a DOT shelter, where Hart’s step-son met them from
Today, as the
couple try to put their lives back together, they live where they were brought
that very night -- in the basement apartment of Steve’s mother’s house in
Pratt. AKA the “Rosary Lady,” Steve’s mother Cecilia earned the moniker by
leading the rosary at every weekend Mass at Sacred Heart Parish in Pratt for
several years.
In a strange
sense, the three have come full circle. Less than a year ago, Cecilia suffered
serious health problems, and had left her Pratt home to live in
“When she came to
stay with us, she was expected to only live a few days,” Steve said. “On Dec.
4, she moved back home to Pratt. She calls my wife Mary an angel; says she
saved her life.”
Now, the couple live with Cecilia, who, as Steve and Mary work with
FEMA and their insurance company and other organizations to get their life
back, does anything and everything she can to help them get back on their feet.
“We were more
fortunate than the people who didn’t have families to go to,” Hart said. “We
were very blessed. God took care of us.
“The most amazing
thing in the house is that where we had a prayer meditation area – a breakfast
nook with a crucifix and palm and a Mary and Joseph -- there were two windows,
the only two in the house that weren’t blown out. That area was untouched. That
crucifix on the wall had two rosaries on it, and they were still there. It was
like God was saying he was there and alive and in our lives and that he cares.
It was just an awesome feeling. He’s going to take care of us. It takes away a
lot of the fear,” Hart said.
“If you have one
foot in yesterday and one in tomorrow, we miss today. We need to cherish today
the best we can.”