There was, you see, this storm…

Chris woke me up at 3:30 this morning; the air raid sirens were going off. We got the dogs and huddled in the bathtub, and listened to the battery radio, until we could hear that they’d stopped, and the radio was saying it was miles past us.

That’s not my car.

That’s my car. I didn’t have time this morning to take pictures, so I got them at lunch, and a lot of the neighborhood is cleaned up… but you can still see some of the damage.

I love how bright and sunny everything is today, all fresh and clean… except, oops, that tree isn’t quite where it should be. We had gale-force winds; it doesn’t seem like we had tornadoes, just straight-line wind knocking things over.

A lot of houses look like this today – the City will pick up piles of brush later on, and it’ll all look normal. These are the lucky houses.

This is the worst one I saw. This is the same tree that smashed the car in the first picture. It hit the corner of the house it stood in front of, and was laying solidly atop the neighbor’s house – I have no idea what the damage is like, because you can’t see the house for all the tree in the way.

See? There’s a house under there. It was the most gorgeous, full-growth red oak, too – I’m gonna miss that tree.

This is the neighbor across the street from me; she lost about half of this big pecan tree.

The same tree, from the OMG, Scary Tree Monster view.

This kind of stuff is everywhere – mostly oak leaves, plus random bits of stick.

Our herb plants are a little smashed down, and we lost a couple of limbs the size of my arm… but nothing major at our house.

On an unrelated note, one of our neighbors is building a Sanford & Son style… shack? on the back of his truck. It looks like he saw an over-cab camper, and decided to replicate it out of bits of random scrap metal and wood. There’s a steel frame in parts of it, and it has a swinging metal screen door – this looks like a trailer you’d live in, rather than a hauling type thing.

Maybe some deep-seated instinct is telling him that he should have a mobile home.

0 replies
  1. admin
    admin says:

    Yeah… I was walking along thinking, “Gee, it’s a shame I don’t have any polyphemus caterpillars going right now… I could feed a lot of them on these oak leaves!”

  2. admin
    admin says:

    I don’t know that neighbor at all well, or I’d say I could check with her and see if she would want you to come cart it off…

  3. admin
    admin says:

    That one was one of THOSE trees, ya know? Like, I never knew the people who lived in that house, but I smiled every time I saw this great spreading oak. It’s so weird to see it laid over on the houses like a tossed-aside child’s toy.

  4. admin
    admin says:

    They’re really… characters. I wanted to get a picture of the front of the truck, which has “TINMAN” worked on it between two bald eagles in a combination of piece-welding and spray-paint… but he was in the trailer working on it, so no photo of the grill for now!

  5. labrys6
    labrys6 says:

    Yeah, I hear you. Big spreading non-conifers are so rare and special here that when one of them goes down it just breaks my heart. There is a beautiful sugar maple in town that just draws my eye to the traffic-hazard point every fall.

  6. admin
    admin says:

    I’m in Farmers Branch, which is between north Dallas and Carrollton, along 35. It’s one of those that used to be a sleepy little town a half-day buggy-ride from Dallas, but now it’s almost more of a suburb.

  7. elmsley_rose
    elmsley_rose says:

    OMG

    We had erm, 40mph-ish winds here one night recently, and it was a really big deal for the city. No bath tubs involved tho.
    But that amount of damage – wow!

    I’m glad you and yours got through it ok.

  8. blue_chicory
    blue_chicory says:

    I’m thinking shiitakes, if you’ve ever wanted to try growing mushrooms, grab some of the healthy downed oak and order some mycelium, it should get there just about the time the oak is ready to inoculate 🙂

  9. badgerpdx
    badgerpdx says:

    Your name and avatar reminds me of a little story when I was a garden designer in Louisville: I was in a collectors garden, and there was this tall healthy plant with really strong striking foliage…It was very floriferous, and the flowers looked familiar, but somehow wrong…I asked te gardener what the plant was.

    “Chicory”…was his reply. “I wanted to see what it would do if it was planted in really good soil, irrigated, in partial sun, and fertilized, instead of burning sun in burnt out clay with no water.”

    It’s a marvelous plant.

  10. rosecolette
    rosecolette says:

    Eeeeeek! I am finally someplace where there is internet and I just saw this. So glad you and Chris are okay!

    P.S. Also happy you received the box. 🙂

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