Post-Irma Post

Not my house!  Photo by Creative Loafing

The storm is gone.  The winds have subsided and the rain has stopped.  I went to work yesterday and the roads were clear.  Clear coming home, too.

So I was surprised when I left for work this morning and found that a major limb had fallen off of one of my many trees and landed smack dab across my driveway, blocking me off and effectively keeping me from leaving.  It wasn't there when I drove home last night. It must have fallen sometime overnight, but I didn't hear it fall.  

I was lucky it landed on the driveway and didn't hit my house.  Or my car (it was a big limb and would definitely have done some damage). I was lucky it didn't hit me.

Luckier still: it missed the power line along my road by no more than two feet.  In fact, some of the smaller branches (it look like the major limb brought some smaller branches down with it), were on the opposite side of the power line, but I couldn't tell if they had rolled down there after they had fallen, or if the branches had come down on both sides of the power line.  It would have been ironic to have maintained power throughout the storm, but then lose electricity after the storm finally passed.

I managed to move the broken pieces out of my way and carry them over across the street to where the city eventually picks them up, along with lawn trimmings and the like.  One big piece was too heavy for me to lift, at least by myself, but fortunately for me, that big piece landed in the English ivy next to my driveway and out of my way, so I was able to leave it where it laid and still drive out.

My guess is that since the wood looked slightly rotten, some dead branches up high had finally absorbed enough water that the extra weight finally caused them to fall.  Of course, that makes me wonder what's going to fall next, and if I'm yet out of the woods, so to speak.

Everyone has their own story to tell about the storm, and I know I'm lucky to have been so minimally inconvenienced (one of my coworkers still doesn't have his power back on, and probably won't until some other repairs are completed on his house, probably weeks from now).  People in Florida have lost their homes and everything.  People in the Caribbean have lost their lives and loved ones.  I'm not complaining about having to move some branches out of my way two days after the storm - if anything, as I was carrying downed wood across the road, I felt I was sharing, even if momentarily, the burden my brothers and sisters south of me are experiencing.