10 Yrs. To Build, 12 Min. To Destroy

I have been offline over the past week due to a tornado touching down in our backyard. A terrifying experience. It came at 3:00 in the morning, waking us out of a sound sleep. Of course we had no idea of what was happening, only that the weather outside was continually getting worse culminating in a massive crashing , crushing sound. We live on 2 acres of lakeside property with 28 mature trees. We lost ALL of them and the house got hit a little.

Now the joy of dealing with insurance and the major disruption to our lives. The marvelous thing to come out of this tragedy is the incredible show of assistance from friends, family and strangers. What we thought would take months to clear up has been accomplished in just over a week. We had continuous day and night shifts of people chipping in to clear of our property. Friends and family pulled in favors from their contacts to speed up things. I had continuos emails on my iPhone on volunteers offering their help of labor or meals and moral support. Friends cried when they saw the scope of the destruction.

A fabulous volunteer group called Samaritan's Purse set up shop in town and provided us with three volunteers who worked like dogs to help. Two of the young people were from Utah. Everyone worked as a great team. We almost had a chainsaw shop going with sharpening and re-fueling. We went through countless cases of water as the heat was about 80 -90 degrees everyday.

We are now able to look ahead and to the future. Mother Nature dealt us a bad hand that night, but our human bonds were our ace in the hole. Our landscaping is a clean slate again and we are able to see more of the lake now. There were no injuries in the town and the community is closer. Where once there was darkness now there is light.

(In the photo we uprighted the barbeque to boil water as the power was out.)