photo by: Sara Shepherd

Relatives and friends of Cherry McCabria, 88, work on Friday, May 31, 2019, to salvage items and clean up the property after a tornado destroyed McCabria's home of more than 40 years at 1455 E. 1900 Road, northwest of Eudora. McCabria, who went to the basement before the twister hit, wasn't injured.

Cherry McCabria, 88, didn’t even try to leave her basement until she heard her neighbor yelling.

“Cherry! Cherry!” she recalls hearing from above. “In my heart it equated what the shepherds heard on Christmas. It was just so relieving.”

McCabria — “scared to death” but otherwise unscathed — had just survived what she would soon realize was the storm of her life. Chris Paxton, who lives about a mile up the road, had come to get her out.

With his help, one careful step at a time, she made it up the stairs and through her home of more than 40 years, now roofless, shredded and filled with debris.

“It was like walking through a nightmare, really,” McCabria said, “like you were going through a dark forest, and there were ghosts out to get you.”

McCabria’s farm at 1455 East 1900 Road, northwest of Eudora, was among those in the path of the EF-4 tornado that hit Douglas County Tuesday evening and stayed on the ground more than 31 miles before lifting in Leavenworth County.

After seeing the tornado warning on TV, McCabria packed a tote with her medications and other necessities, and rode her electric lift chair down to the basement.

McCabria lives alone, but a younger woman who helps her had come for dinner and joined her downstairs.

Years before he died in 2015, as a gift to his wife, Bob McCabria installed a walk-in cedar closet in the basement of their house — a four-bedroom ranch he built himself, on land they’d already lived on and farmed for decades.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Cherry McCabria, 88, of rural Eudora, talks on Friday, May 31, 2019, about riding out the May 28 tornado that destroyed her home of more than 40 years. McCabria moved into a Eudora nursing home, at least while she and her family decide whether to rebuild.

Inside that cedar closet is where McCabria and her helper rode out the tornado. They turned off the TV and all the electricity before heading down, and though they found McCabria’s weather radio had a battery leak and didn’t work, both had their cell phones.

“We sat down there through the storm, saying prayers and holding hands,” McCabria said.

McCabria said she didn’t hear much when the storm hit — “our house is a very sturdy house, you know” — but her ears popped, like they do on an airplane, and she knew something serious was going on.

Unable to get through to her son who lives in Eudora right away, she called Paxton. She guesses it was maybe 20 minutes after the storm passed that he arrived.

Her nephew, Douglas County District Court Judge James McCabria, showed up, too. She can’t remember whether she called him or he just worried and headed out.

Without electricity, Cherry McCabria couldn’t use her chair to get back upstairs, but the men braced her and helped her up one step at a time. She thinks that, plus getting out of the house, took half an hour.

“There wasn’t anyplace clear where I could put my foot,” she said. “There was a board, or insulation, and the boards all had nails in them.”

With power lines down and fallen trees all up and down the road, neither man could drive his truck up to the house. So they had to walk farther yet.

At one point, she said, her nephew, the judge, lifted and carried her over a particularly muddy stretch.

After the group made it to Paxton’s house, McCabria reunited with her daughter Robyn and husband Mike Kelso, who took her to the hospital to get checked out. Son Russ McCabria, of Riley, came to town and met her there.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

Russ McCabria, of Riley, works to clean up on Friday, May 31, 2019, after a tornado destroyed the home northwest of Eudora where he lived much of his childhood. McCabria’s mother, 88-year-old Cherry McCabria, was in the basement when the twister hit and escaped without injury.

Kelso said that Paxton, unable to drive his truck in, ran more than half a mile to reach McCabria. After digging a path through debris to reach the stairs, he said, Paxton practically carried her out of the basement.

Though the walls were mostly still standing, McCabria’s house was a total loss. It will be demolished, the family said.

The twister completely flattened three barns and three metal grain bins on the property. Cars and boats that had been in those barns were strewn around the property.

“Sea Nymph,” for one, came to rest in a field across the road, its propeller buried in the mud.

Mike Kelso said some of his father-in-law’s farm records from the 1980s blew all the way to Lansing. Someone found them and tracked down a relative with the same last name, who retrieved the papers and returned them to McCabria’s children.

McCabria’s dream is to rebuild and, with helpers, live out at the farm again and maybe have a place for the younger generation to take over. The family’s going to discuss, she said.

On Friday, relatives and friends worked to salvage items from the home and pile up metal debris and broken trees on the property.

photo by: Sara Shepherd

In what used to be the garage, relatives and friends of Cherry McCabria, 88, work on Friday, May 31, 2019, to clean up the property after a tornado destroyed McCabria’s home of more than 40 years at 1455 E. 1900 Road, northwest of Eudora. McCabria, who went to the basement before the twister hit, wasn’t injured.

McCabria was trying to get her things organized in a room at a Eudora nursing home, where she expects to stay at least for the time being.

“The beauty of the whole experience was seeing how people pulled together,” she said. “We’re just ever so grateful for the love and support, and to see all the cars lined up there at the farm.”

There is sadness, though, she said.

“I hope no one else has an experience of losing a home they love,” she said, and began to cry.

At this moment, a nursing home employee walked in with an arrangement of yellow and white flowers in a yellow smiley-face pot.

McCabria tore open the little card, and saw that the cheer-up bouquet was from the pastor of her church, Eudora’s St. Paul United Church of Christ.

McCabria does cheer up.

“You have moments of sadness and moments of gladness,” she said. “I guess we learn we don’t travel through this world alone.”

photo by: Sara Shepherd

A boat, pictured Friday, May 31, 2019, rests in a field after being flung across the road by a tornado that destroyed the home of Cherry McCabria, 88, northwest of Eudora. In addition to destroying McCabria’s home of more than 40 years the tornado flattened three barns on her property — the boat had been inside one of them — as well as three grain bins. McCabria, who went to the basement before the twister hit, wasn’t injured.