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Family counts blessings, friends after tornado ravages community By Derek SpellmanTHE JOPLIN GLOBE (JOPLIN, Mo.) “He always had a smile on his face,” Ryals said. “He was just a good person.” The help of friends is part of the coping process, Lori Peterson said. There is something helpful about being humbled and allowing others to help at a vulnerable time. “We couldn’t have gotten through it without our friends,” she said. “You definitely have to count your blessings,” she said as she walked among the remnants of the family farmstead on Wednesday. “If you focus on what you have lost, you’ll get swallowed up.” The land around Lori Peterson is scarred but slowly healing. As a portable generator hums outside her home, coils of smoke twist upward from a pile of debris the family is burning. Wess Peterson and his brother are busy gathering downed limbs and brush and feeding them to the flames. Three operations are actually contained in the Peterson farmsteads northeast of Racine. Two deal in the breeding and sale of goats. The third deals in equipment, such as pens, for goats and small stock. The needs of the herd have been one source of help to the family, said Jan Smith, a family friend who drove down from Elkland, Mo., to help. “This is still a working farm,” she said, and the daily rhythm of work have helped the family keep going. The road that climbs to the Peterson farmsteads is now passable, although downed trees and branches have been piled into hillocks on the roadside. The remains of the barn where Rockie Peterson died have been largely cleared away. The herd is safely ensconced in rebuilt pens. There were some solemn moments on Wednesday. There were also moments of robust laughter, like when family and friends joked about turning the hole in the roof of Lori and Wess Peterson’s house into a skylight, if it turns out the house is salvageable. Until his death, Rockie Peterson, his wife and two of the couple’s three children lived in three dwellings around the farm properties. Lori and Wess Peterson live in one of the three. Carine Davis, the daughter of Rockie and Treva Peterson, lives in the third with her husband, Lael. Of the three houses, the one inhabited by Rockie and Treva is sturdiest. So when Lori Peterson heard the severe weather approaching early Saturday evening, she and her husband headed for their parents’ house a stone’s throw away. Rockie and Treva Peterson had been out doing chores by the barn between the two houses. Carine Davis and her husband were not at home. 
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