The chainsaw's song
Blown down and scattered
Today as I sit in the window I hear the song of chainsaws all around me. There was a windstorm on Sunday night, which continued through to Monday. Winds reached speeds of 99km an hour, which is a Force 10 gale on the Beaufort scale. In real life that means that trees are uprooted or torn apart, roofs fly off, and sometimes houses are destroyed. Electrical and above ground cables can also be damaged and break off their poles. Along with the wind we had relentless rain, which kept clearing and falling, clearing and falling, so bridges were flooded too.
The oak tree in front of our house tore itself in half, some branches landing on the roof, some in the front garden and some in the back, but we were among the lucky ones – our home and our doors and windows stayed intact. One hundred and twenty four families lost their homes – blown away in the storm, and many of their possessions vanished too. Some of them are staying with relatives, but some are in the community hall, and now that the sun is shining again the task of rebuilding will begin.
No one has counted the cost to the oak trees. They lined our main road and some of the older streets in the village. Most have them have fallen, either completely, roots ripped from the ground, or else they have shed branches and are barely trees any longer. They’ve shaded the villagers for more than two hundred years, and overnight they’ve been destroyed. The cows are eating oak leaves off the fallen branches, but next year there will be no acorns for the pigs or the horses. This year there was a place just down the road from me where flocks of doves gathered in the shade, on the tarmac – I didn’t understand why, until I saw that passing cars were crushing the acorns and feeding the doves.
We still have no electricity, so anything in a freezer is now indedible, our local shops will have lost so much stock. To charge this laptop and our modem we drove to the next town, but it took almost four days for an internet (cell phone only signal) to be restored, by which time we had all run out of battery power.
In closing – all is well – and we had the privilege of enforced time out from the demands of the world, which felt very strange, but very real. Reading by candlelight. Having conversations in the street. Getting our news from people we know instead of algorithms. That was good.
