The worst part of Sandy is over, and although the newscasters are telling me there will still be winds coming, it will be nothing like what we had last night.
From the roar of the wind to the crack of trees and branches that you couldn’t even see, the whole night was surreal.
But, now it’s over.
I went out to survey the damage and was really relieved to see that we escaped completely unscathed.
The neighborhood is eerily quiet, with the underlying hum of generators from every other house helping me to imagine a collective sigh of relief from those inside.
During Irene, there was only one generator in the neighborhood, yet, this morning I counted more than five homes that were humming away.
So, remember this scene from my backyard a few weeks ago?
Here’s how we look, this morning:
One dead tree fell in the backyard, inside the fence, but it fell toward the house, so the fence didn’t break and it wasn’t tall enough to hit the house.
The kids are enamored of the branches that Sandy shot straight down into the yard:
(these first two actually fell on either side of the wires connected to the house…how they didn’t bring down the wires, we will never know)
We lost a huge limb that just missed our fence and just missed the baby’s room:
As that one fell, it brought down a ton of smaller branches with it, again, just missing the fence:
We lost one lightbulb on the deck:
Pieces of bark were stripped from the trees and tossed into the yard:
Near misses all around us.
We are grateful.
Down the street, our neighbors had a tree snap in half:
But our next door neighbors had a tree fall directly on their house:
The sky is still gray and ominous, and it makes me think of everyone who did not fare as well as we did.
Facebook is full of friends who were flooded out, had trees breach the roof, lost decks, lost cars.
Our beloved beach is gone.
The news is even worse.
The story of the two boys who were killed by a falling tree while playing in their room hurts my heart in a way I can’t even begin to explain.
So, today we are grateful and are holding those who did not come away unscathed close to our hearts.
