On December 15, we woke up at 1:00 AM to one of our carbon monoxide monitors beeping. The power had gone out during the night and the battery in the monitor had died. Shortly after waking, we heard a crack and a crash outside. I raised the blind to see what had happened and found the children’s favorite tree lying flat on the lawn. Within seconds, I was yelling and praying as I saw two of our tall, old pine trees starting to fall. Miraculously, these 70-some-year-old trees fell, missing everything but a section of the fence. God is so good!

The power remained out for almost 3 days. The temperature in our house dropped to a low of 50 degrees (outside it was in the 20s and 30s), despite a constant fire burning. Our children thoroughly enjoyed the power outage. Catherine was happy to be “living kind of like Laura Ingalls Wilder” would have lived. They all liked sharing beds at night and being covered with lots of blankets, in addition to their comforters. The storm proved to be quite an adventure for them.

I found that the 45 mile an hour sustained winds, with gusts between 60 and 100 miles per hour, brought neighbors together. Some of our neighbors shared their wood with us. A man, who lives in the neighborhood behind us, offered to cut up the trees for us. We will be working in our backyard together.

We will be spending the next couple of months, or so, getting rid of the debris via our yard waste, filling in the huge hole left by the trees’ roots, having at least one precarious tree (another tall pine) cut down, and planting a couple of new trees. In the spring, we will put grass where the three pine trees stood. The children are excited, as they will have more room to play.