Thursday, January 31, 2013

On tall trees and wind storms

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When I look at the windows or our house I can almost imagine that we live in a more rural place than the suburban cul-de-sac that is reality. Mostly, because we are situated on top of a hill surrounded by tall trees.  We can barely see the houses on the street behind us. It is quiet, oh so quiet, here.  Except today because the wind is really strong.  I am listening to it roar through the tall trees.  There are several very tall trees on or bordering our property.  Most are pines but there is also a huge, old Sycamore and what we think is a very old cherry tree.  The trees are lovely.  They wave, shimmy and sway.  Today they are waving furiously, trying to get my attention.  Possibly because pieces of them are falling off.  I woke up at around 4AM to the loud roaring of the wind. It sounded like jet engines overhead.  Worried, I got up and peeked out the windows.  The trees were more mobile than usual.  I did hear debris falling on our roof but nothing that sounded too serious.  I went back to bed but found it hard to settle back into sleep.  I kept expecting to feel our house sway in the wind.  In Buffalo, in our old three story houses we always felt a slight rocking when the wind blew hard. Now we live in a one story house made of concrete block.  It does not move.


Upon waking for the day we discovered that several good-sized pine limbs had fallen in the night.  Thankfully, they fell away from our house.  Later, Mike called me after he'd left for work to tell me that one limb was dangling over our roof near the chimney.

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we first took possession of the house one of the first things we had to do was to remove some small trees that were growing too close to the foundation.  When I say they were close I mean the trunks were rubbing against the roofline. Another surprise was that two of the trees were hollies.  I had no idea that holly could grow that large.  Then we noticed that the large tree at the front of the garage on the berm was a gigantic holly.  My father stayed with us for a week helping us do some projects before we actually moved in.  Removing the trees was on the list.  We had some mild weather to help out and he and Mike spent several days bonding over a chainsaw, taking down 20ft. holly. The trunks were cut up with the chainsaw and stacked for future use as fuel for our fireplace. Seen in this last photo is also the Sycamore tree with an ugly wound from a previous storm, possibly Hurricane Sandy which blew through the area just about a week before we closed on the house. Guess we'll need to buy a chainsaw.

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