The Idiom
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I collect idioms and quotes like some people collect stamps. My favorite sources for mining pith are Mark Twain, The British, and the Romans (everything sounds better in Latin) in that order. And my favorite idiom comes from the Brits...

Safe as houses

I'm willing to bet that safe as houses wasn't what you were expecting. And considering the other great wit and humor of the British, it might strike you as odd that this innocuous idiom should be my favorite. "Where's the Monty Python or the Winston Churchill quote?! Who are you and what have you done with Scott?!" But I stand by my assessment. Of all the homespun wisdom to leak out of the sceptered isle, that is the finest.

Should you be zodiacally minded you might attribute this to my being a Cancer, home-loving bunch that we are. Or as a "dog", by which I mean I was borne on the first day of Sirius' supposed influence on the planet's weather (hence the "Dog days of summer"). So I'm supposed to be a homebody twice over. Well, I am not predisposed toward allowing the stars to guide my decisions (barring one falling on my head) so I must dispute you there.

Like Mark Twain, I am a product of Missouri. A creature of my past as much as my present. In my writing, the Midwest and the Midwestern aesthetic crops up again and again. I've lived many places, I spent almost a decade in Denver, but Missouri is still home. I don't know how that feeling will pan out as the years pass, but I can't get past that fact. And it is to my roots in Missouri that I attribute my affection for that particular saying.

What does Missouri have to do with a British Idiom?
Because if you come from the Heartland, safety is sometimes a fleeting concept but home never is.

One of my strongest childhood memories is the wail of sirens, accompanied by the view of tile floors as I crouched in a turtled position with my fingers interlocked behind my head in the textbook 'Duck & cover' position. As a lad, I remember listening to the storms pass overhead. Hunkering in basements and hallways as storms raged around us like the finger of a wrathful God being dragged across the landscape.

The centerpieces of most of my early childhood memories are dark basements and wailing sirens. Hunkering down beneath the doctor's offices where my mom worked. The blat of the television as warnings scrolled across the screen. My sister explaining to me the difference between a "watch" and a "warning". The chirp of grandpa's police scanner as the Civil Defense storm chasers reported in with the current location of any funnel clouds in the area. The weird green light and the horrible silence that comes moments before the storm hits.

All of that sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? It would be, except for the odd bit... you become blase about them after awhile. Plenty of the memories are punctuated with looking up from the shag carpeting of a neighbor's basement and noticing hey, they have a pinball machine! The earliest tornado memory is the one in the dark basement of the Ob/Gyn where my mom was a nurse. I had no idea what a tornado was, what it looked like, or anything. Only that that the lights were out and it was something to hide from... like a monster. The darkness and fear left my over-taxed imagination free reign and for years afterward, I envisioned something akin to the Cavity Creeps whenever a tornado was mentioned.

I've read the accounts of people who grew up in London during the Blitz. For awhile I couldn't figure out how they talked about goofing around in the rubble, or decorating their gas masks. Making jokes in the dark of the bomb shelters as the stormcrows of the Luftwaffe dueled with the RAF overhead. Until I realized that for those kids, it was just like the tornado drills when I was a kid. The darkness and fear was punctuated with equivalent of hey, they have a pinball machine! Why don't we have a pinball machine?

Sirens wailed. Hail pounded the roof. Thunder punctuated the silences. And the whole time, there was the impression that home was safe. If I was in the basement of my parent's house, surrounded by my HotWheels and GI Joes, I would be fine.

My hometown was in the crosshairs of the storm that recently swept across the Midwest. A 1/2 mile wide tornado ripped through the town. Houses were lost. Lives were shattered. Someone was killed. CNN carried footage of the devastation. Grim-faced talking heads read out the toll of damage. And people around here asked me the same question they asked people from Louisiana when Katrina hit If this kind of thing happens; why would anyone live in such a place?

With Katrina I was one of the people asking the question. Now I'm expected to answer it. And the answer is actually pretty simple. Because it's home.

Like Twain, I lost little time in heading out as soon as the opportunity presented. I don't hate Missouri. I'm allergic to everything that grows there to a point where I'm practically allergic to the state, but I don't hate it. There are some who have inferred that I do from things I've said in moments of curmudgeonly pique down through the years. "It's a great place to be from." or "It's a nice place to grow up but you wouldn't want to live there." I kid you not when I was a youngster, there was like five minutes when the Missouri state tourism board actually had the motto "Missouri loves company". Like the guy at the tourism board (who probably lost his job) sometimes I say things because they're funny, not because they're necessarily true.

But for all of my cynicism, Missouri was a great place to grow up. Vast forests and meandering streams, verdant fields of winter wheat, riotous colors of maple trees in the fall and mud puddles deep enough to lose your sister in followed by snowfall deep enough to bury your mom's car (sometimes the next day). These are the things I remember besides the songs of sirens and the terror of the tempest.

I talk about growing up in Sedalia and the people around me think I grew up in Mayberry. It wasn't quite that bucolic, but I do find that my memories gel better with the people I know who are twenty or thirty years older than me than with the others who are my age. Burgers at the drive-in, playing war with wooden guns in the woods near our house, catching crawdads in the creek out back or playing baseball with plywood bases on a dusty lot.

Home. It's where the heart is, even if it can't be where the body is. My family came through the recent natural disaster just fine. A tornado isn't a hurricane, its path is relatively narrow, its impact relatively localized. This is the first time my hometown suffered appreciable damage since I was a kid, so I guess the impact of this on the national consciousness is already beginning to fade. Soon "Twister" will fade back to being just another B-movie gathering dust on the video store shelf.

My family is a little rattled, but otherwise fine. Safe as houses, you might say. And I will continue to love that phrse because people who've been in the crosshairs never forget. Because safe as houses is more than an idiom. It's my childhood in three words.