Thursday, October 24, 2019

Counting Blessings

Early Monday morning our area of town experienced an EF2 tornado. The tornado narrowly missed our neighborhood by about one street. The damage is truly devastating. The path the tornado took is my drive to get anywhere in town and seeing the aftermath is so sad. Huge, several hundred year old trees are completely uprooted. Beautiful fall maples are sliced in half. Fences are down and some people are missing roofs. Even a few huge trees landed on homes. It is a mess and so heartbreaking. Every fall I enjoy taking a route into town where the street is lined with dozens upon dozens of glorious red maples. The trees are massive, the sun hits them just right, and the red leaves are vibrant. One year I got a photo with them because they are just so beautiful.Unfortunately, they are ruined. Not all of them, but over half of them.
We had no idea we were going to get such bad weather. Our phones didn't alert us and we didn't hear any sirens going off. Scott and I were awoken around 12:30 from the loud storms and also our power went out. It felt like we were up and down all night long. We kept looking out the window and trying to see what was going on, on our phones. Scott ended up going upstairs to sleep because our monitors weren't working. By the time my alarm went off in the morning I felt like I had gotten zero sleep. I got on Facebook to see if anyone was talking about it and everyone was wondering if we would have school since the school + all of the surrounding areas were out of power. We got a call from the school saying they did not have power but would still have school and if they didn't get power back by 10:00 the students would be sent home. They then called later that morning saying they had enough natural light in the school to continue the rest of the day and the kids would be served sandwiches for lunch instead of having hot meal options.
Meanwhile, I was home panicking about the 1000 ounces (or more!) of milk I have saved in my deep freezers. As soon as Scott dropped Campbell off from school I had him run to Walmart to grab ice. I was keeping a close eye on it to make sure it was okay. I would be devastated if something happened to it. Wells drinks a bottle before bed every night not to mention I pumped three times a day for 4 months to save that up!! Our power came back on after 13 hours and my milk was still frozen solid, thank goodness. We got our power back much sooner than surrounding neighborhoods. I think we were a priority since we are on the same line as Campbell's school. I was so thankful for power because our house was beginning to get really cold and we ended up spending a long time at Chick Fil A for some warm food, power and entertainment!!
We are so grateful that we didn't have any damage from the storm. We have so many trees in our backyard and not a single one suffered from it. So many were not so lucky. My old neighborhood had so much damage. I drove around and couldn't believe my eyes. One of Campbell's classmates home was so damaged they aren't able to live there right now. The class is coming together to do some things for the family that will hopefully be very helpful.
It's so crazy how you can be going about your day and it can change in an instant. The scary part to me is that I had no idea a storm this big was going to happen. I can't believe our phones didn't go off to alert us. It's so shocking to see the damage and will take a long time for it to repair. I'm counting my blessings this week.

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