6/20/14—Gaining Perspective

This was the scene throughout my neighborhood today as massive
trees came down. See the next pic to see the damage this one caused.

This has been a week of changing perspective for me. 

It started on Monday with some pretty crushing news. Well, crushing for my little world. It's nothing I won't survive. But just when I was feeling like my world was coming to an end, a storm hit. 

A real storm. With thunder and lightning and hail and wind. Last night, something evil this way came. And it was very localized. I came out unscathed. A limb went down in my back yard, but it literally fell just feet from where I drag all the fallen limbs to retire...haha. In my front yard, there was a lot of debris, but no damage anywhere. 

So that huge amount of tree threaded the needle between the
pine and the house and only caused that much damage!
The house next door was unscathed. 

All around me, though, enormous branches down. One guy had about half a tree land on two of his cars and all he got was a dent and a broken windshield. On the next block, a massive tree came down. It somehow managed to fall perfectly in the narrow space between two houses, circumventing another tree that you'd think would be in its way. There was very little damage done. I saw the same scenes, block after block—massive tree damage, very little personal property damage and zero damage to human beings. 

Last night, for the first time ever, I moved to a safer place to wait out the storm. As I was hunkered in my bathroom with my three dogs, it occurred to me that the news I got on Monday was nothing in comparison to if me or the babies got hurt...or the house got badly damaged...or all of us were swept up in a twister. And as I looked through the neighborhood today, I saw how fortunate even the hardest hit were. We were all under angel wings last night. 

I fared pretty well. I have no trees in my front yard, but
was the benefactor of a neighbor's tree. Look across the street
and there's nothing. But the guy next door to him had two cars
damaged and he had huge limbs that blew about 80 feet
into other yards. It was a very weird storm.

So I still have a mess to circumvent from the news earlier in the week. And it will be a journey. But I'm alive. And my dogs are alive. And I have electricity and a stable home to live in tonight. As I've learned so many times in my life, things could always be much worse, no matter how bad they are today. So we should be grateful to the challenges we have. Everything looks better in the light of something worse. 

As an FYI, there is going to be an extra post this week. Tune in Saturday to hear what happened when I discovered somebody came out with a deck and book a lot like the one I had published last year. It's a story you won't want to miss. ;)