Everett is going to sleep in the pack-n-play in our bedroom (I hope!). I can hear Erik outside talking with several people. Evidently, he made it off the roof safely. He is surrounded by at least an arborist, the son of a Board member, and a few neighbors. But, I also hear someone walking on the roof—who knows who that is.
We came home this afternoon at about 4:40, and while Erik was giving Everett a bath, I popped into the office only to see a tree trunk staring at me from the window. A tree had fallen on our house at 4:02 this afternoon according to our neighbor. We weren’t home.
At that point, Erik began the dozens of calls he would need to make in order to get the tree off our house. Luckily, our two beautiful dogwood trees broke the brunt of the fall. So, as far as we can tell right now, no damage to the house. However, I have heard one of the trees creaking in a desperate help-seeking way (of course several large branches from our trees have been pulled off and one dogwood tree is splitting in half under the offending tree’s weight).
Why would Erik need to make dozens of calls? Can’t Erik just get a chainsaw and hack the now deceased specimen of nature? We live in a planned community which means that there are lots of rules . . . our cluster rules-gotta call the Cluster Association-that resides in a larger association-gotta call the Reston Association—then recall everyone when noone calls back—then call everyone on the Board to find out all but one are out of town, etc. We’ve got to get the tree of our trees and house before the tree busts through our dogwood canopy and into the office and screened in porch. Also, I bet the neighbors would appreciate a lack of chainsaw noise at midnight.
It will be interesting to see how they accomplish this without messing up the structure of the house. The longer it takes, the higher the chance that the dogwoods will come down due to weight and gravity, and our newly repaired deck and home will take quite a beating.
8:37 Erik and I brought out all our portable lights and our house lamps . . . they are trying to locate a support branch from another tree so that when they start cutting, the rest of the tree just doesn’t slam down on them. The evening isn’t too hot, but it is quite buggy.
There is a guy scaling the tree climbing it with all the gear that a rock-climber uses. With the clouds, it is pretty much totally black out there.
9:30 Everyone has left. The tree is still on our house, but the arborist was able to use other trees to pull pressure of the dogwood trees and our roof. Still haven’t heard from the cluster association. Hope it isn’t windy tonight.
View from our kitchen
View from our backyard (Mom and Evy are enjoying popcorn)
