so i wandered downstairs, grabbed a bowl of honey bunches, and sat down to watch the tube. it was no surprise to me that it was raining. as i've said before, its been raining non-stop since saturday...or maybe even before that. i wouldn't know. anyway, i was watching some music videos on vh1 to get a jumpstart on the day. didn't last too long, though, because eventually the clouds interrupted the satellite signal and all that was on after that were snowflakes. on the tv i mean.
i gave up and turned the tv off and resorted to watching the wind swirl all around the yard, stripping the trees of any bit of leaves that managed to cling on to the end of november. much more entertaining. amazingly enough, there is still quite a bit of green in many of the leaves. thats the southern fall for ya. eventually the trees started to bend. my mom had joined me in the dining room. we kept screaming playfully as the gust of wind turned in our direction and the raindrops and leaves spattered and stuck to the windows. our mood the entire time was never dampered by the rain. it was actually quite fun. the wind picked up and grew worse and the sky was pitch black. the scence outside resembled the warm-up session of an aerobics class. the trees looked as if they were trying to stretch and reach their highest branches to their tippitoes...or roots. whatever. some of them were lashing back and fourth like whips.
all of a sudden my dad ran downstairs saying (that is a carefully selected word) "get in the basement." i thought he was joking. he didn't say it in any kind of hurried or worried manner. he went on to say "with all this rain we've had, the roots are really weak. this wind can blow them over. get in the basement." with that, we all rushed downstairs and continued to watch the leaves swirl about in the backyard through the basement window. the backyard was a carpet of colors...brown was becoming the prominent color as the rain continued to fall. the lights flickered off, then back on for a second, and then off again to leave us without electricity for the remaining hours of the day. after about ten minutes, the wind died down and all that was left to the storm was the pelting rain. my dad, who had to take a shower because he had work later, decided it was safe to head up from our shelter. no sooner did he leave the room did the final dying breath of the storm sweep through our debris covered yard. i guess my dad was standing at the top of the stairs when he heard it. i could hear it from where i watched the storm from the basement window. it in truth, wasn't very loud. in fact, it was a somewhat soft "thud."
"oh my gosh! come see this! come see this!" those are not the words anyone wants to hear. we all knew that it had been a tree, but my dad's exclaimation withheld the vital information: where it fell. my first guess was the car sitting in the driveway. who knows why that was the first thought that came to my mind. i hurried up the basement stairs into the dining room right around the corner. there, three feet from our dining room window (which is where we had been watching mother nature's show earlier) on the narrow patch of grass that lay between our house and driveway, a giant oak tree, about twenty inches in diameter, had laid to rest. the circumstances are incredible. a small (perhaps twelve-inch diameter) hickory tree that lay in the path of the falling mighty oak managed to snap a limb of the oak that would have hit my sister's bedroom (which is right above the dining room). the broken limb was forced to the other side of the tree; the hickory also guided the tree away from the house. the top of the tree was just short enough to touch the house and not break the window, but did manage to strip our beautiful 50-ft canadian hemlock from its branches on one side. it looks quite pathetic now. you would most likely have to see a picture to understand this scene. maybe i'll get a hold of a picture for you.
with all the chaos on that side of the house, we failed to notice until some time later, the other close call we had on the other side of the house. another oak tree (about the same size) that had lived in our neighbor's yard, fell right next to the sunroom. the root ball that the tree made when it fell is about twelve feet tall. you could prolly make a swimming pool from that hole. again, it didn't hit the house, but broke a few of its neighboring friends' branches on the way down. that one is about ten feet from the house. within fifteen minutes from the trees making their suicide dive into our lawn, dad was out there with his chainsaw chopping them up.
so, in the end, we have two trees perfectly paralleling either side of our house. my dad just finished cleaning up the last two trees that were down from the hurricane two months ago. now he's got two more. poor daddy. anyway, we definitely have something to be thankful for this thanksgiving. a home that isn't destroyed, our lives that weren't lost from standing so close to where the tree eventually fell, and that the driveway wasn't blocked in so dad could go to work that afternoon. okay, so maybe that last one doesn't seem that great...but at least he has a job to go to.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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