Took A Hit

With so much ghastly weather going on these days – fires, floods, tornadoes (with the hurricane season barely started) – you wonder sometimes when you’re going to get yours. It seems inevitable that those often-confused, often teary-eyed faces looking in wonderment over some disaster zone will be, eventually, replaced by yours.

We came close last night, enough so to make me a believer in the unrelenting power of nature, but not close enough that the first job this morning had to be the purchase of a chain saw.

I think it’s called a microburst, just a localized sneeze of eighty or ninety-mile an hour wind that lasts only seconds. Both my wife and I woke up to close the bedroom window and heard that often-cited jet plane sound – the roar of ancient monsters; heard, too, a loud crack from down the street that you knew was not a good sound.

Sunrise brought the damage into view. Again, we came close, but this was not a disaster. Still, numerous large branches came down, along with power, phone, and cable lines. One tree fell across a car, and a branch that’s a good eighteen inches at its base split and cracked and still hangs in the tree – what the loggers fondly call a widowmaker.

Both the city and private companies will, no doubt, have the street cleaned by the end of the day, and I’m sure more than one insurance adjuster will be roaming the neighborhood. Still, what could have happened didn’t, and that’s a reason to be thankful here in northern Illinois.