Relative Something

Warnings were showing up everywhere we looked Monday night, indicating a severe thunderstorm was heading for our location. I had a news station on the television with a meteorologist struggling to find new and different ways to say the same thing over and over about the impending threat, and a livestream of storm chasers on my laptop with constantly refreshing Doppler scan radar images of the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area.

Possible winds as high as 70 mph were coming our way. It was dark outside, so we couldn’t see it when it hit, but we could hear it. At one point, Cyndie and I looked at each other and acknowledged we had just heard something big coming down.

Before we’d even left the house yesterday morning, we could see the crazy number of leaves stuck to the back deck and the front steps. There were an almost equal number of small and medium-sized branches on the ground everywhere we looked.

It didn’t take long to reach the largest chunk of a tree that snapped and crashed to the ground in the woods near our house.

We could hear the sound of a chainsaw coming from a neighboring property. I prepared myself for the possibility of finding a big tree that had come down. Instead, we just encountered a shocking number of fallen branches beneath every tree.

There was a significant number of willow branches both under the tree and scattered across the driveway.

When I got around to mowing, it required a lot of extra cleanup effort around trees.

The debris on the ground from this storm was greater than any prior event we’ve seen in our 13 years here. I consider it a blessing that we did not lose any large trees in their entirety. The rain gauges captured just over an inch of precipitation, so we escaped any ill effects of flash flooding.

Probably the most satisfying fact we can feel happy about is that the shade sail shows no signs of any damage. That was one heck of a test of its ability to remain up during periods of heavy winds.

In the afternoon, we heard another chainsaw being used by a neighbor on the other side of us. It occurred to me that we should have taken a little drive to see the extent of tree damage around our township.

The warnings we received were accurate. The damaging winds that had been advertised arrived and delivered.

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