Sunday, August 23, 2009

When the bough breaks...

I have been terribly bad about posting on any kind of a regular schedule lately and that's something I'm going to work hard on changing now that school is starting up again. Actually I have a really good excuse for my absence this week...now I sound like one of my teens when they've come in after curfew, "I swear I have a good excuse this time!"... but we had a bit of a calamity here Wednesday night and things have been in... hmmm... let's just say a "state of disarray" ever since.
We had a small storm that night, nothing major, no heavy winds, no fierce bolts of lightening...but as it was winding down I heard a strange cracking noise that went on for several minutes followed by a dull THUD. Then the power went out. I looked out the front door to find that the massive, 100 + year old, Black Locust tree next to the house had decided that it was tired and that it was time to put down one of it's trunks. There was no horrible crash and amazingly nothing except a few power lines were damaged. Even my neighbor's bushes and flower garden came through unscathed! And usually his car would have been parked right where the trunk fell but he was gone at the time. It really seemed like the tree decided it was just time to put down the burden. Unfortunately there is a huge crack running down the middle of the rest of the tree so the whole thing will have to come down....it's heartbreaking to loose a giant tree like that. Who knows all the history that he's seen go past, it's like loosing an old friend as we've lived here for 25 years.


It's been kind of crazy ever since. First the parade of firemen, police, and power company people; then the next few days more power trucks and employees discussing whether the rest of the tree was in immediate danger of falling...they decided to take off some more limbs to prevent more destruction of power lines...then my hubby, son and neighbors wielding chainsaws to clear the debris, and tomorrow the tree guy will be back to take down the remaining tree. I know I'll shed a few tears in the process, I hate to see him go.

These pictures were taken Thursday morning after the firemen had removed all the limbs in the street and the power lines were back up. So you can see I Do have a pretty good excuse for my distraction! Hopefully we'll be getting back to normal soon.

3 comments:

  1. Oh my! Thank goodness no one was hurt! I am sorry you are losing your beautiful tree Cynthia. We had to remove a huge beautiful old fig tree in our backyard years ago for the same reason, and I still miss it.

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  2. thats so sad... an old tree is as a member of the family. Perhaps you could find somebody, who can make you something wonderfull from his wood. A chair or a cup? So you could have something left... send you some thinkfull sunshine . Tinki

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  3. Wow-
    This just happened to friends of mine, a huge old oak.
    Glad to hear no one was hurt, sad though.

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