Crazy wild storm!

Boy howdy we had a storm last night. The sky went black as we watched the rain come into town. We stood out on our porch and watched the curtain of rain come up Main street! The wind was HOWLING! It was whipping the trees around in every direction and there was lightening and thunder one right after another! Crazy wild night!

Here it looks innocent enough...

But what you see is actually a 1/3 of the tree that broke and fell across Main street. And the really crazy thing was that as we were watching that tree fall.... there was a little white car driving past it. That car nearly got crunched! The tree hit the street with about a car lengths distance between the tree and the little white car! It was seriously close! We had gone into the house at that point but when we saw that.... ! My honey and I went running out onto the porch and saw our other neighbor standing on their porch and we're all, like crazy with adrenalin! All four of us were just screaming "did you see that?!" (these are the neighbors that live in the old parsonage that went with this church/house) Anyhow, the wife came over and we stood out on our porch for a while waiting for the town clean-up crew to show up and move the tree. I mean, it WAS on MAIN street after all. ;-)

So these two shots were taken this morning and not last night so you can see in the first photo that the limb had been moved to the side of the road. That limb actually took out part of our neighbors oak tree across the street. Not anything serious but cosmetically speaking, that oak tree look's a bit wonky and sad now.

In this photo, you see the top of the second 1/3 of the tree that came down about 10 minutes later! It's facing our side of the yard and it damaged another smaller maple tree that we really liked. As a matter of fact... This whole week we had been having our tree's trimmed and our tree's on this side of the yard were actually crowding that maple. After our trees were trimmed we figured the maple would now be able to grow straight and fill out on the side facing us! But now.... not so sure that tree will be salvageable.

This is how it looks now. Evidently, at one time in the past, this tree had been struck by lightning! We noticed the split, at the "Y" of the tree, when we first moved into town nearly 4 years ago. While walking to church in the wind, we could hear the creaking. But we found out a couple of days ago from the tree trimmer, that the damage was even more than what we or our neighbor thought! Our neighbor came over to talk to our trimmer about trimming this very tree and that's when we all found out that the tree just needed to be taken down completely. There was a split running nearly to the ground on one side of the tree that no one had noticed until the trimmer showed it to us. So the neighbor decided to have it taken down. And, it was supposed to come down next Monday!

I was trying to find a photo of the tree before it came down but... I guess I don't aim the camera in that direction very often. At least not so you could see that tree. But it was a rather nice sized tree.

So, our street is going to be looking slightly different now that our trees have been trimmed and our neighbor's tree will be taken down. Hopefully we won't have any more trees coming down in the next storm. 'Cuz you know... we'll be having more storms in our neck of the woods.

That was our excitement in our neighborhood. What's been going on in yours?