TALLULAH — A strange feeling still comes over Billy Thornton during the quietest of times in his new home in the tornado-devastated Willow Bayou neighborhood — the only fully rebuilt of about 30 homes in the farming community northwest of Tallulah.

“It’s home, but it’s not home,” he said of his modest, vinyl-sided dwelling built about six feet closer to the main road than where his old house stood the morning of Saturday, April 24, 2010. “I’m still trying to get used to it. All the memories and stuff were in the other house.”

Thirteen members of Thornton’s family, including his wife, Janice, and now-deceased mother, Eloyse, were huddled in an interior hallway while the twister tore through the dusty community of gravel roads, modest brick homes and trailers. Piles of twisted metal and bricks fill the landscape at four empty slabs — hauntingly undisturbed a year later.

A fireplace mantle from the old house was saved from the rubble, as was the mounted head of the six-point buck his mother shot in 1972.

“You know, we never found a shingle. We never found a rafter,” Thornton said, adding the roof simply went “straight up” into the wall cloud. “But, I’ve been here 60 years. I love it here, so unless we get two or three more tornadoes, I’ll be here the rest of my life,” Thornton said.

The tornado spawned over rural Madison Parish around 11 a.m. was part of a larger system of severe weather that had moved across the Midwest two days earlier. In northeast Louisiana, initial reports of the tornado came in about 11 a.m. . That is where the “long-track” twister began a 149-mile path of destruction across the parish and six Mississippi counties.

Forecasters estimated it reached EF-3 intensity over Eagle Lake, with winds between 130 and 150 mph, then hit EF-4 over Yazoo County, where the tornado grew to 1.75 miles across — the widest ever recorded in Mississippi — and winds reached 170 mph. Four of the 10 deaths attributed to the storm were reported in Yazoo County. No fatalities were reported in Madison Parish or Warren County. The tornado injured 49 people and destroyed more than 700 homes in Mississippi. Two people were reported injured at Eagle Lake, where structural damage was confined to Sea Island Drive. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency estimated 69 structures were damaged in Warren County.

Rebuilding for the Thorntons, who once owned several acres of fertile corn-growing acreage around the old house, was a mix of glorious charity and government red tape. A double-wide trailer next to the house where daughter Christy, her husband, Alan, and three children had lived was blown away by the tornado — but replaced with a new one by Methodist churches from Baton Rouge who sent disaster response teams to the area, Thornton said.

Insurance on the old house helped finance the new one, Thornton said, but building permits from Madison Parish and flood insurance to comply with updated flood maps showing the area was in a flood zone cost more than $1,000 initially.

Most enduring of Thornton’s memory of the tornado’s aftermath was the spirit of generosity among neighbors and others who gathered at Willow Bayou Baptist Church, where nearly all in the community worship weekly.