Afternoon of a storm

For most of the afternoon the air was still and the land quiet.  Animals cut down their usual cawing, woofing, meowing, preferring to lurk and brood instead.  The wind dropped to nothing, ending the usual sounds of breezes passing among trees.  The storm remained far-off, still in the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles and some healthy mountains away.

Still, that's a wide, wide storm.

Then the skies clouded up around 3 pm, and rain tried itself out in fits and starts soon after.  Some sudden winds raced through the land in bursts.  Already we needed to turn on indoor lights, it is so dark.

Our homestead power remained on.  But already some Vermonters (7759) have been cut off, especially down south.

Thanks, Green Mountain Power!

We flung ourselves into social media to keep up (we never watch tv, and can't pick up local radio well enough).  Google News is good for headlines.  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and this blog keep us connected to our friends - and thank you, friends, for your thoughts and wishes.

When not online, we took the opportunity to bring down a dangerous tree.  It was an old, big thing, dead some years and slightly rotten.  It was also about a dozen feet from the house, meaning the wind could blow it into our bathroom or front hall.  So we hacked at it with axe, cut a bit with handsaws, hacked some more, until the tree looked ready to move.  We tied a long rope to the highest part we could reach, and Ceredwyn hauled on the other end while Bryan pushed the trunk with hands and shoulders.  We pulled and pushed, hollered and strained, until the wobbling dramatically oscillated and a deep groaning, then cracking muttered forth from the bole.  One piece of a limb fell off, nearly hitting Bryan, and the rest came tottering, thudding down.

You could climb onto the stump and peer down into accumulated rings of time, tracking the progress of years and lesser decay.

Our own bit of destruction, snuck in just before Sandy's full might descends.