It's an ill wind that blows no one good, the old proverb says. But as James and Sabrina Patterson spend Christmas in their family's fourth home in eight months, they are building a new life in the wake of the ill wind that tore their home asunder last spring.
"We took the bad and made it into a good," said Sabrina.
Sabrina smiles a lot. So does her husband.
The Pattersons had planned to stay in the Cottonade neighborhood forever. The couple bought a home on Welsh Place in the neighborhood off Yadkin Road in 2007, when the Army ordered James to Fort Bragg. They set about remodeling the place, putting in hardwood floors and granite countertops. They decided this would be it, their retirement home.
When James, a first sergeant, was shifted to Fort Riley, Kan., in October 2009, the couple made a deal: This time the family would not follow him. Sabrina would stay in Fayetteville, keep her job with Cumberland County and let their daughter finish high school here. James would retire at the end of his stint in Kansas after 22 years in the Army, and they would put down roots in Cottonade.
But on April 16, about 3:30 p.m., a tornado ripped up those roots.
In about 30 ferocious seconds, it lifted the roof off their home - then set it down again - and smashed their windows. It tore off the top of their sun room and covered their floors with insulation.
That day's brief but brutal storms damaged about 1,300 homes in Fayetteville, almost 600 of them destroyed or with major damage. The citywide damage was about $100 million, city officials estimate. The same system spat out twisters that killed five people across the region and crumpled the Lowe's Home Improvement store in Sanford.
Like so many of their neighbors in Cottonade, across the city and beyond, the Pattersons had to start again.
James and Sabrina Patterson were born in Allendale, a South Carolina town of about 11,000 people 30 miles west of Interstate 95 near the Georgia state line. Sabrina's mother baby-sat James when he was small.
"It was like Mayberry," James said.
They started dating as teenagers in 1986. He joined the Army in 1989, and they were married May 14, 1993, on James' birthday.
"She asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said, 'Marry me,' " he said. She had already turned him down a few times.
A local judge married the couple in her living room, the wall adorned with pictures of all the other couples she had hosted before. If their photograph is still there, it is the only one from their wedding day.
Until living in Cottonade, the family moved with James wherever the Army sent him, from Texas to Georgia. He served two tours in Iraq.
On the day the storm hit, Sabrina had just returned home from dropping off their 16-year-old daughter, Jasmine, at a nearby friend's house on Fort Bragg when the TV started flickering. It had been raining, but the sky briefly turned the prettiest blue she had ever seen. Then the rain and hail returned, fiercer than before. The announcer on the TV said a tornado had been seen in Cumberland County.
Patterson brought her dogs in from the yard. She called her daughter and ordered her to stay indoors.
Peering through her bay window, Sabrina saw the wind yanking the trees around and decided she had seen enough. She grabbed her purse and cellphone.
"I took off down the hall, got in the bathtub," she said, "and just prayed."
The roof lifted off the house, then sank back down. She heard glass shattering and the muffled thumps of unknown things hitting the walls outside. The storm was, quite literally, roaring.
"It sounded like a train," she said.
Then, within a minute, it was gone. Sabrina lifted herself out of the tub and pushed open the bathroom door. There was insulation everywhere. Belongings flung around. Windows broken. The roof of the sun room was peeled back. One two-by-four was stuck in the roof; another had smashed through their 22-year-old son Ricardo's bedroom window and hit his bed. The screen door hung from its hinges, the glass gone.
"I've never seen so much damage in 20 or 30 seconds," she said.
Outside, her Toyota Camry looked "like someone had blasted it with a shotgun." The dogs' cage was wrapped around what was left of the backyard's lone pine tree. Most of the trunk had been snapped off and tossed over the house, smashing into the chimney and landing in the front yard. One branch was skewered so deep in the ground it could not be removed and was later cut off level with the earth.
The roof was gone from the house across the street. Patterson was crying. Someone she didn't know gave her a hug and told her everything would be all right.
The stranger was right, but his prophecy would take a while to come true.
When Patterson reached her daughter by phone, she learned they had seen nothing but rain. Then she called her husband in Kansas.
"I said, 'Honey, can you call me back?' " James Patterson remembers. "I was talking to a soldier."
He had no idea what had happened. A few minutes later, she called him back.
"She was breathing hard," he remembered. "I said, 'What's wrong with you?' "
He still feels bad when he thinks about it.
"What if she wouldn't have made it through it? We've been together since I was 19."
Sabrina ordered her husband to stay where he was. She didn't want him driving while worried. He told her he would stay put.
"That was a lie," James said. "One of my friends said, 'She said she's all right; don't you get on the road.' I said, 'Shoot, man, I'm going home.' "
He got in his car and drove 19 hours straight back to Fayetteville.
Sabrina spent the rest of that Saturday checking on elderly neighbors and helping round up neighborhood dogs that were loose. Fearful of looting, she spent the night in her darkened, damaged home alone with her dogs. She didn't answer when rescue workers with flashlights came by and knocked on the door.
When James Patterson turned from Yadkin Road into Cottonade the next afternoon, having picked up Jasmine, everything looked normal. People were washing their cars. Then he rounded the curve onto Welsh Place.
"It was like a bomb went off," he said. "Just like what I had seen in Iraq."
Had he driven in by himself, at night, he doubted he could have found his own house.
The couple stayed there for a week, rounding up their belongings. They spent three weeks in an extended-stay hotel on Owen Drive while finding a rental home in Hope Mills where they could keep their dogs. They thought about going back to South Carolina, back to family.
"I was like, 'I want to go home,' " Sabrina said. They looked at homes in Allendale, but jobs were scarce. They decided to stay in Fayetteville but made the tough call to sell their home in Cottonade. Sabrina was still driving back there every morning, though, to put Jasmine on the school bus to finish her year at Westover High.
In the meantime, James had to return to Fort Riley to see out his time in the Army.
"I felt really bad, driving off," he said.
"If anything happens to this one, that's it. I'm going to rent me an apartment," the 41-year-old Sabrina Patterson said. It was the week before Christmas, and she was hefting another box out of a U-Haul and into the garage of the family's new home in the Roslin Farms West development in Gray's Creek.
Wrapped Christmas gifts were piled in the dining room ready for the arrivals: Nieces, nephews and grandparents from Allendale; their oldest daughter, Shakeema, from Germany, where she is serving in the Air Force.
James, who is 45, retired from the Army last month. Their first Christmas in a new home will be the first time in years the whole family has been together for the holidays.
"We're going to have a houseful for Christmas," Sabrina said.
She could hardly look any happier.
She still thinks of tornadoes whenever she hears a train. Sometimes the thought wakes her at night.
"It'll eventually go away," she said. "Something happens and you get past it."
They miss their home in Cottonade. It has been remodeled now and looks immaculate. Jasmine misses her Tinkerbell-themed bedroom. Sabrina misses the trees, but the storm left few of them standing in any case.
"It doesn't look the same any more," she said. "It's different."
Their old block is a construction site. The house opposite theirs, the one that lost its roof, is being rebuilt. For now, it's a timber frame. A week before Christmas, contractors' trucks were in the driveways of several houses. A few windows are still broken.
"Some people lost everything," James said.
Looking back on what she calls their "moving year," Sabrina said she has plenty to be thankful for.
"I could have been one of the ones who got killed," she said. "But I survived. I'm still here."
She believes the storm and its aftermath brought her family closer. It cemented her husband's decision to retire from the Army and not accept a job that would take him away from home again. It made her daughter appreciate what she has.
"It's almost like a blessing, even though it was bad," Sabrina said. "It could have been worse. Way worse."
Staff writer Gregory Phillips can be reached at phillipsg@fayobserver.com or 486-3596.Source: http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/12/25/1144424
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