“Will ya look at that?” Emma says. “Branches all over the yard are bad enough, but that one that smashed into Lincoln’s house is huge. And it’s still up there!”
“I know! I saw the whole thing from inside my cedar hedge home when it happened.”
The Captain pulled the treetop off the woodshed roof with his old beater truck while the Admiral ran for the tape measure. Thirty feet snapped right off the top of a tree to the left of the woodshed.
And another long branch is still up there – it got hung up on the way down.
“Good grief!” wails Lincoln. “That was my lookout tree. The whole top is gone. And I had plans for all those cones left on the tree.”
“I feel just sick!”
The forces of nature make changes on Earth,
They make creatures realize what life is worth,
The wind can move trees and the branches around,
It howls and it yowls with a frightening sound,
The birds and the squirrels take cover and hide,
They shiver and shake while the storm they outride,
But after a night that they spent curled up tight,
They creep out and check in the bright morning light,
To see if their home world is standing there still,
It’s been slightly changed, but survive it they will.
April 6, 2021 at 3:49 am
Oh gosh. I hope everyone is safe, Anneli. I’m not a fan of wind.
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April 6, 2021 at 10:00 am
I hate it when it’s windy, and I think the animals are frightened of it too. The yard was full of branches (just after the Captain had picked it all up), but we were just glad nothing was damaged.
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April 6, 2021 at 6:47 am
Oh wow. Scary. Is the shed damaged? Glad the trees didn’t land on the house. Good luck removing the debris.
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April 6, 2021 at 9:57 am
We were lucky this time. All is well. Thanks, Lori.
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April 6, 2021 at 7:03 am
Oh no! The look on Emma’s face says it all! I hope nothing was damaged.
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April 6, 2021 at 9:57 am
All was good, but Emma did wonder about all the blowdown and she supervised the removal of the treetop.
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April 6, 2021 at 7:07 am
Good grief, Anneli, what a storm! I love how you envision through your animals’ eyes.
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April 6, 2021 at 9:55 am
Oh, that’s easy, Jacqui. They just tell me, and as long as I’m listening, I know what they’re saying. 😉
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April 6, 2021 at 12:16 pm
I love that.
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April 6, 2021 at 7:07 am
I hope the very full wood shed roof wasn’t damaged, Emma is a beautiful girl. Lincoln survived!
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April 6, 2021 at 9:54 am
No, the roof was fine, amazingly. We love all our little animals so we’re glad everything was okay. I was happy to see Lincoln come out of hiding the next day. He sleeps in that woodshed.
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April 6, 2021 at 12:57 pm
Great news, your woodshed is so packed. How many cords of wood are in there? Pine is a soft wood so it’s no surprise the top of the tree snapped off. Don’t burn that wood. Yikes!
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April 6, 2021 at 2:29 pm
It was a Douglas fir that snapped off. I think the woodshed holds about 3 and a half cords on each side, so let’s say about 7 or 8 cords when it’s plugged full.
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April 6, 2021 at 6:24 pm
That’s a lotta wood, wow. OK, I thought it was a white or red pine. Doink…
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April 6, 2021 at 6:51 pm
We don’t have a lot of pine here on the coast. Some, but not a lot. It’s mostly fir and a bit of cedar. In the interior it would be different.
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April 6, 2021 at 7:02 pm
OK, I love cedar, it smells so good.
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April 6, 2021 at 10:53 pm
I like it too.
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April 6, 2021 at 7:47 am
I hope it didn’t do any harm to the shed!
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April 6, 2021 at 9:53 am
We were impressed that it didn’t make a dent in the steel roof of the woodshed.
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April 6, 2021 at 10:29 am
I’m happy for you! 🙂
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April 6, 2021 at 9:36 am
Emma and company look a bit shook up. Quite the storm, I hope there was no damage to your house.
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April 6, 2021 at 10:22 am
We were really lucky the tree top didn’t hit the house. It flew about forty feet as it is.
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April 6, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Wow! That’s a wind storm! Any damage to your house? Glad to hear that the dear little Lincoln is safe. 🙂
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April 6, 2021 at 12:10 pm
No damage to the house, but our patio chairs all slid to the far end of the deck. I was happy to see Lincoln after the windstorm.
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April 6, 2021 at 11:49 pm
You were so lucky that the woodshed didn´t get damaged and that Lincoln survived! Lots of work to clean up this mess!
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April 7, 2021 at 9:05 am
Yes, we were very lucky.
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April 7, 2021 at 1:59 am
There is so much action in your backyard!
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April 7, 2021 at 9:05 am
Never a dull moment.
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April 7, 2021 at 4:46 pm
Poor Lincoln!!! And poor Captain! the gardener HATES the wind. He grumbles more about that than anything else!!!
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April 7, 2021 at 5:13 pm
Wind is so bad in the garden. It dries things out, knocks tall plants over, and blows away the soil. Boaters also hate the wind. It means the sea is going to be rough and that always spells trouble.
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April 7, 2021 at 5:17 pm
Oh, yes, even worse for boaters than for gardeners, I guess. But I think the gardener suspects the wind is conspiring against his work haha.
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April 7, 2021 at 5:18 pm
Well, of course it is!
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April 8, 2021 at 3:22 am
Wow! That was quite a storm! I hope all is well.
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April 8, 2021 at 9:38 am
Everything is good. We escaped that treetop and the rest was just a mess of smaller branches in the yard. I hope that’s it for the winter!
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April 9, 2021 at 9:19 am
Fingers crossed!
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April 8, 2021 at 11:01 am
I hope you save everyone of your nature poems, Anneli, because they would be terrific in a poem anthology of animals and nature and humans observing it all. We feel like it has been a windier winter and spring than we’ve ever experienced before. And so many tree branches down. The squirrels and birds are constantly reevaluating their home perch.
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April 8, 2021 at 11:26 am
I keep imagining a bird coming in to land on his usual morning perch and falling down onto the ground because the branch is not there anymore. As for saving the poems, I started saving them just two days ago when I realized that I had more than just a couple of them in my posts. I already have 38 saved and those are just from last year. It kind of made me feel sorry for having inflicted so many on my followers 🤔 Be nice to me or I’ll write you a poem. Haha.
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April 9, 2021 at 4:52 am
Oh, I’d take a poem from you ANY time. I love your poems. Keep saving them – you never know. You might decide to publish an anthology of them, sorta like what I’m about to do. :-0-
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April 9, 2021 at 7:49 am
Your upcoming book is going to be a real winner!
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April 9, 2021 at 8:02 am
THANK you! If it is, it’s thanks to your help!
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April 9, 2021 at 8:08 am
I love the way you’ve put the snippets of your life into a sequence so it looks like flashes of a movie, and it comes together with meaning – a sequential laying of the groundwork that summarizes who you are and how you feel about family, love, and the things that matter in life.
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April 9, 2021 at 2:26 pm
XO
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April 15, 2021 at 1:26 pm
Oh, my! What a disaster for poor Lincoln losing his lookout and his plans for the cones. Luckily no one was hurt. I love, Anneli, how you get inside these cute creatures heads and always have the right shot to go with your poems.
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April 15, 2021 at 3:36 pm
Thanks a lot, Carol. I take a whole bunch of pictures in a few minutes and then I look at them close up to see what’s going on. Sometimes they just seem to speak to me. The expressions on their faces and their body language is so much like ours that it isn’t hard to imagine what they’re thinking.
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