Damage

There's been a few new facts come to light regarding our recent severe weather here in these hills. For one thing, after spending several hours picking up many, many limbs and branches I realized that the tornado had freed our trees of their excess baggage. The Great Ice Storm of January 2007 caused incredible damage to every tree within several hundred miles of our house. There isn't a tree around here that didn't lose at least a few limbs. And even with our best efforts we just couldn't get all of them down after the weather warmed. That's been over two years ago and we were still working on getting all of those old limbs down. The tornado took care of a lot of those in one morning. So I guess one good thing came from the terror of May 8.

We've had one insurance adjuster do his thing recently, but not for the barn. Rather, this fella looked at the roof of the house, something we hadn't even really thought about considering the major structural damage to the barn. It turns out though that we had at least 75 mile an hour winds and hail that was at least as big as golf balls. So the greater part of the roof will have to be replaced. I imagine our insurance company just loves us as the only part of the roof that doesn't need replacing is the part that was replaced after the ice storm. So, two years, two storms, two huge roof jobs. I also discovered today, after pulling back the drapes, that my sliding glass doors are just about to fall to bits. They've always been ugly, with the outsides covered in white water stains, but the hail of this last storm really did a number on them. Looking back, I do remember hearing things hit them when I was waking up that day but the wind was so scary that I guess I forgot about the hail. It all adds up to a bunch of work for the insurance folks and hopefully a big enough check to repair all of the damage.

On a more introspective note, I do understand that violent weather serves many purposes. The most obvious reason, alluded to above, is just the simple idea of washing away the old thus allowing the new to come forth. Our trees don't look quite as shaggy now that most of the dead stuff has been blown off. Severe weather also goes a long way to proving to us mere, and yet endlessly arrogant humans, that we are but small parts of creation. Yes, we are sentient, we are conscious, we are mighty. We can create great things and we have a great capacity for destruction as well. But nothing beats Mama Nature, nothing! We can invest millions of dollars in research and development, we can put our best and brightest to work on new ideas and new concepts and we can build with the strongest, most advanced materials. But if she wants to do some damage one swift swipe of her arm or even a sidelong glance can unmake our greatest achievements and unbuild our greatest structures. There's no contest. We are mighty enough to make this planet dangerous to ourselves and other living beings but we can't even approach the power of She Who is In Charge.