An Anniversary: Part 4

Dh was at work so my parents offered to drive the boys and I to our home.  We knew that with no traffic lights, tons of trees and limbs still down and all the other obstacles that it would take a little longer than our usual 30 minutes…we had no idea it would be over 2 hours!

The bridge to our home was fairly new, very high and still intact.  The causeway was severely damaged and limited to one lane.  Still we couldn’t grasp why there was so much traffic!  Our county is large but not this populated, this many people couldn’t really be trying to get home.  Then we learned that the interstate bridge was damaged (wiped out really) and that this was the only way to the north part of our area.

There were national guardsmen at major intersections helping with traffic.  Once we finally got to the turn for our road I was beyond antsy.  Our street actually looked pretty good…homes intact, road intact, roofs intact.  Then we saw our yard.

We had two very tall pine trees in our front yard.  One of them was down, taking the power lines and pole with it, covering the street and well into our neighbors yards.  Most of our neighbors were on their porches or in their yards cleaning up.  One was sitting on our front stoop resting after spending a good deal of the morning trying to clean up the pine tree mess.  Details get a little iffy for me here, I remember going in the house and hunting down and finding all my kitties.  I remember being shocked at all the damage in our backyard…fence gone, screened in porch compromised, trees lying everywhere.  They had all come down facing toward the house, all lying in the same direction on the ground.  What a gust of wind that must have been.  I remember neighbors coming over and saying they figured we hadn’t come home because I had had the baby…we updated them on some of the damage around town as there was still very little communication between counties.

But our home was still there, our kitties were safe, our neighbors weren’t too upset about our pine tree damage…things were good.  Or so we thought…