National Blog Post, Tree edition

Last week, on Tuesday, a tree fell in our yard. Literally fell, from the neighbor's yard, into ours. It smashed the fence, the storage shed, the retaining wall, the deck, and part of our new gutter. It is eighty feet of cottonwood, across our backyard. I'm not really okay with the mess, but honestly, I'm not terribly upset. It's our good neighbor. I know that she will help take care of us, without resentment, and I'll do what I can to help her out.

I'm not upset about the stuff either, an old storage shed and the deck needed replaced anyway. They'll deduct for depreciation, which means it won't be replacement value, but that's the breaks. They are repairing the retaining walls and replacing the gutter, as well as our patio furniture, but again, it's just stuff.

What I am soo very thankful for was the fact that we were running behind that day. When I say that, I mean that we have a routine, in which we eat lunch, read quietly for an hour or so, then take care of chores, and on nice days, finish up by playing outside until dinner. THAT day, we were being slow. Everyone was dawdling, and no one was really in the mood to clean up. I was willing to let most of it go, but we nearly always get mice in the fall, and there was food in the basement that we really needed cleaned up. They're usually outside at 2:30pm, and the tree fell at exactly 2:36, right over the part of the yard that the boys hold for their pretend battles.

And so I'm thankful today that the kids were dawdling. I'm thankful that if a tree had to fall, it was from our neighbor on the right. And I'm really thankful that this morning, we had a nice team of guys in our yard, removing most of it and leaving some with which the kids could play.