(Said like Admiral Ackbar says, “Super Star Destroyer”)
Behold the great pine that came down in a CRAZY thunderstorm last night:
Notice how it gobbles up our patio furniture…
Last night, it started storming REALLY badly. My husband and I turned off our computers and went to our bedroom to read. As we were laying in bed (I was reading Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods by the way), we heard the thunder rumbling about us. All of a sudden…we heard a huge CRACK and BOOM! The entire house shook. Both of us sprang from our bed and ran to the windows. Looking outside, we saw the largest tree in our yard had fallen and demolished our patio. We both praised God that it had not fallen a few feet to the left. If it had, it would have landed right on our heads where we were laying in bed.
We examined the damage and, for the most part, the tree seemed to be touching the house but not damaging it horribly. After my husband and I began making necessary phone calls, I heard him shout across the house, “I need you to get a bucket right now!” In our bedroom, we had water pouring through our currently-turned-on ceiling fan. Yeah. Not a good thing. I took care of laying down buckets while he turned off the circuit breaker. The fire department came out to see about our electrical issues and a roofing company came to tarp the roof where the giant pine had punched three holes. Blessings to that man! He and his partner put up the tarp while it was still storming!
Turns out the tree was about 65 ft. tall. A portion of the trunk is still up in our back yard and it is taller than our house. To give you perspective, the part of the tree that is currently on the ground covers our ENTIRE backyard lengthwise! It’s HUGE!
My husband and I are SO blessed to be alive. We are so blessed that no one in the neighborhood was hurt during those storms. We are so blessed that we sustained minimal structural damage to our house! The Philosopher and I are looking forward to a restful, hopefully uneventful evening.
And…yeah. Didn’t get my writing done today. I wonder why? Turns out, dealing with a tree down in your yard and a leak in your roof is pretty time consuming. Who knew? 😉
I will hopefully be able to post something about writing tomorrow, but for now, I am enjoying a nice work-free evening. 🙂
~L.M.
Unearthing Words 
Scary. Glad everyone is OK, and the damage is manageable.
When we lived in Stone Mountain, GA, we had a pine tree fall over onto the house near our bedroom. It did not damage the roof, because it was leaned over at only about 65 degrees. The next day, I as able to climb up on to the roof and push the tree off the corner, where it landed on the ground with a resounding thump. Only damage was a bit of bent metal in the gutter.
That’s good. Yeah, trees can really wreak havoc on a house. We were very fortunate and blessed it didn’t do more damage.