June 16, 2004
Storm
We had a sizable black locust tree on our west property line that shaded the patio rather nicely on a summer afternoon. We don’t have it anymore.
Our town’s in an anticlinal basin (that’s geomorphology-speak for valley) that catches and protects culture’s persistent remodeling and replacing of the atmosphere. It also gets its share of thunderstorms and tornados. Even on the calmest days, our patio strangely enjoys a kind of venturi effect that makes for a comfortable breeze. When the storms come, that effect is doubled in spades.
The black locust, in its waning days, anyway, was wrenched in twain in last Sunday’s fierce electrical thunder storm. On the way out, it took with it a major portion of CP’s carefully manicured herb garden, an elegant patch of Broad Mountain fire pinks, and a screen of forsythias that made for good neighbors. It spared the house.
Indeed, those who’d lived next door for thirty years and moved away nine months ago, seeing the damage, would have promptly attended with chain saw in hand. Their successors, twenty feet away behind their kitchen picture window went about as if nothing ever happened. Our tree guys came early Monday morning, finished off the locust, stacked up the new firewood for next winter, and left the place looking, for sure, as if nothing ever happened.
CP’s baking one of her choice cheese pies for the new folk next door. The commandment only said to love.