I woke this morning a little after 8. I was surprised that I slept so long, since I was in bed well before midnight. Unlike every other morning this month, I wasn’t awakened by sunlight flooding the room. There was no sunshine.
I had cracked the window near the bed in the middle of the night: I love the option of air conditioning when it gets hot but I hate the staleness of a closed up house. The smell of rain was in the air.
I got up and made coffee, then went out on the porch to see if it was still uncomfortably hot. It wasn’t. The sky was thick and threatening but it wasn’t terribly muggy. I watched a handful of female cardinals in the grass. We have several pair that live in our yard. Earlier in the spring, before our little maples had filled in, we counted eight pairs of them in the trees one day.
This morning, there were no males in the grass, only females. They were almost invisible. That just goes to show that to nature, the females are more valuable than the males. After all, a species can continue with only one male; it’s the number of females that dictates how healthy the chances of survival are. Only an insane species would deliberately put its females at risk. On the other hand, there are over 6,000,000,000 of us, the danger of extinction isn’t exactly knocking on our door. Only certain cultures are in danger, not the species. In the eyes of Nature, if the Japanese are too dumb to procreate, who needs them? Natural history is packed with such extinctions, it’s only tragic to those involved. Mother Nature is a cold hearted bitch.
So there were four female cardinals in my backyard, invisible to predators. The males were up in the trees, hidden from any raptors that may have been circling overhead. If male cardinals had the survival instincts of the European elite, they’d have been down in that grass, bright red against the green, waving hand lettered invitations to breakfast at any passing hawks.
Birds aren’t smart but they’re smart enough.
We have strings of white lights on our back fence. They look very merry and festive, twinkling through the boughs of the trees. As I watched, they flickered. Uh oh.
I came in the house and made coffee.
Thank God for small miracles: the coffee was done before the power went out.
Jay was up right before the storm hit. He commented on how dark and scary everything was. It wasn’t the rain that made us jump, but the wind.
Strong storm winds have spooked us ever since June of ’03 when straight line winds took out the 40’ silver maple in our back yard. That had been a very wet June, the ground and the tree were saturated and when the wind hit, there was just nothing for that poor, top heavy tree to hang onto: it went over, roots and all. I saw it go. Talk about perfect timing: the storm hit in the middle of the night. I woke up when the rain assaulted the roof and went out to the TV room to take down the umbrella. As I put my hand on the sliding door, the backyard tree floated to the ground. The rain and thunder were so continuous that I don’t remember the tree making a sound but it must have: our deck was built around it and it pulled a good ten feet of deck up when it went over. Of course, all that cracking, splintering wood sounded exactly like the cracking of lightening, which was nearly nonstop. The tree fell right between our house and garage, doing zero damage to either but it was so tall that it took out the power lines that run over our back yard, plunging the block into darkness and lighting our back yard on fire. According to Jay, I said, in a conversational tone “We’ve lost the tree.”
Then I went out and took the umbrella down. NO sense in losing that, too. I’ve never been good at panic. My reflexes are too slow.
It was pouring rain but the grass in the backyard burned till there was nothing left. Two days later, the hot wires killed our cat. It took over 48 hours for the power company to deal with a live wire, down in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Good work, Excel!! The fire chief, who came out when the cat got electrocuted, told us it was a miracle only the cat died. He said the tree, chain link fence and our garage were most likely hot, too. He was pretty pissed at the power company. After the tree was removed, the power company did re-sod our yard but since then, the grass has never grown well back there. That’s why Jay has to re-seed it every spring, bringing the cardinals out to eat.
This morning’s rain wasn’t nearly as scary as the wind that brought the storm in. Yesterday had been hot, sunny and windy all day so our umbrellas were already down but this wind was so fierce we were afraid it would snap the poles. Jay went to find some shoes so we could go out and take the white one out of the table. The blue was is on the other side of the porch, where the house and trees offer protection from the wind, which was coming from the north, but the white umbrella, at the top of the driveway, was taking a beating. That’s when Zack came upstairs. HE laughed at his dad for needing shoes, opened the door and ran out. It took Zack about ten seconds to get the umbrella out of the table, lay it safely on the deck and come back in, soaked but triumphant!
I noticed the street lights in front of our house are still on, on both sides. The power has been out for over an hour, now. I hope it comes back on soon. The coffee is lukewarm, it’s too dark in the house to read and the internet is out with the power. What a bore.
No wonder people in the olden days invented stuff like math and constellations: there was nothing else to do.
Any storm that blows in on a mighty wind like that is going to pass quickly. Up here in the Midwest, at least. We don’t get hurricanes. No tornado sirens went off in our neighborhood. It’s been dry for over a week so while I’m sure lots of branches are down; I don’t expect we lost too many trees.
Since the AC died with the power, we cracked a few windows as soon as the rain died down a bit. Out on the porch, you could tell exactly how strong the wind was and from which direction it blew: the north window screens were soaked, the south facing window near the downspout was splashed with rain from the roof and the east facing screens were dry. Dry!
The breeze that crept in under the cracked windows was cool, refreshing and had that rain soaked smell that’s my favorite. As soon as the rain calmed down, we opened them wide.
Update:
The sky remained mostly cloudy the rest of the day, although the sun made repeated efforts to peek through.
We closed the house back up and went to an open house for my nephew, Holden, who just graduated from high school. The party was great fun! Jen and Bill had set up a hot dog bar with all the fixin’s you’d want for a great dog. Some time during the afternoon, the power came back on at home: we returned to a house with all the amenities of the 21st century.
After such an exciting day, I was sound asleep by quarter after 10.