Wednesday evening was really a weird experience. The realization that you had been forced to leave your house and you wouldn't be able to stay there because of reasons beyond your control was swirling in my mind. While we loaded the dishwasher and prepped a meal and sat around the table, all that I could think of was how we had to make the difficult choice of whether to stay home or leave. Nature felt threatening at that point. We were at its mercy. But we had made it home safe and sound and the power was back on, the house was warm, the water was hot and our beds were cozy and were ours to sleep in! Well, that was that. Back to good old life with all its everyday occurrences.
Thursday began all clear and calm, apart from the occasional wind gust. We went about our usual routine. Noel had no school on account of burst pipes and such in most school campuses. The harvest festival back home had been drowned out in this mad storm and to make up for it, I made three traditional dishes that Noel ate with so much relish that I was happy we could leave our memorable experience of the last few days behind.
Noel had therapy at 4.00 in the evening and I set him up online and walked downstairs to brew a cup of tea for myself. Fifteen minutes later, the power went out. That literally sent a chill through me. All the memories of the last few days came rushing back and I looked out the window. The wind was picking up and the rain was not heavy but since the temperature had barely made it past freezing, it was literally icing up when it hit the snow from the previous few days. Bad, but hey we had made it through one event, and if we sit tight, another one should be a breeze isnt it? Wrong!
While the cold was making us uncomfortable, it wasn't as bad as it has been the past weekend and it was manageable. Since we had done it once before, we prepared dinner, ate it and as usual set up things for bed. But this time we decided to lug three mattresses from upstairs and line them up in front of the furnace. We all remembered our hips hurting every time we slept on our side the previous Saturday night when we only had comforters between us and the hardwood floors. Funnily, everything seemed easier this time around because we felt confident about what to do. And the forecast was for icy rain only until the next morning. The wind gusts were strong, but if trees had held fast the last time around, why wouldn't they do so now?
We settled down around 7.30 p.m in the living room, Noe lounging on the temporary beds set up on the floor, and Manny, Vincent and I on the couches encircling the makeshift beds, all huddling as close to the fireplace as possible.We each had a device in hand, a phone or a Kindle and were engrossed in whatever it is we were watching/ reading.
About fifteen minutes in, we heard the loudest thud possible like something had fallen on the house and we all sprung up in a fright. Speaking for myself, I stood rooted to the spot because I was sure there would be something falling through to the floor of the house soon. And the sound seemed to come a bit farther from where we all were. The silence following the fall was literally deafening, except for the wind gusting outside, an eerie whistling.
Probably 20 seconds in, we started talking all at the same time. And we rushed to the staircase, climbing up really fast, anticipating the worst. My nightmare was that we would see the sky through a gaping hole in the roof, with the icy rain falling on the carpeted floors. And a tree trunk splotch in the middle of it.
We had kept all the doors, upstairs and downstairs closed to conserve heat. So we went upstairs and opened the door straight ahead and literally braked to a stop. That was Manny's bedroom and his window( which we had installed only in 2022) was in the process of crumbling to the carpeted floor. The glass was tempered and so it didnt break or shatter. It was like watching glass breaking in slow motion. But it was falling right onto the floor and the clinking with every bit that fell. All of us were watching slack jawed as it cascaded slowly to the floor. We promptly stepped back afraid we would step on glass..that would be like adding insult to injury. Unfortunately, there was netting behind the glass and with the darkness beyond we couldn't see much on what precipitated this breakage.
In a minute it hit us that if the upstairs was messed up, then the area just below was probably affected too.
The room exactly below that room was our master bathroom. So we trudged below to see what had happened there. We had just opened the bedroom door when we heard it. The wind. It was howling so loudly. We walked in and slid the bathroom door open and the full fury of the wind and rain hit us. The horizontal pleated blinds over the window was billowing into the house and the same slow motion glass fall was happening. Except this was collecting in our jacuzzi tub( which was exactly underneath the window) which by now had an inch of glass in it and more falling in. And we looked up straight at a tree waving in the wind. If we could reach out and if the jacuzzi wasn't in our way, we'd have been able to touch it. Whoa!!
This time we weren't just slack jawed but stood with our mouths agape, rooted to the spot with no words being exchanged at all.
Ten seconds and we unfroze. Thoughts racing, we came alive to the biting cold. The temperature was still below freezing and now that the window(s) were open to the outside world, the air came rushing in.
First observation: the tree seemed to have only struck the windows and the pointy top end was what we were looking at. Which meant that the roof was intact and not damaged. Or so we hoped.
Second: we needed to stop the wind and rain coming in the house, else we would freeze to death literally.
Our neighbor had heard the noise and we could see flashlights bobbing in his front yard. We yelled out to him to come in and the blessed guy, we are forever indebted to him, slipped and slid and made it to our house. We all stood staring at the mess and we finally decided that tarpaulin might do the trick short term.
It took us an hour, but we managed to use a cordless drill and tarpaulin and seal both the windows. All this, while gingerly walking around the broken glass on the floor. Flashlights held just so, flapping tarpaulin held tight, screws handed out at exact intervals, reminders yelled out about not stepping on the glass, all the while the mind churning..are we safe?
We had already observed really tall trees in our neighbor's yard swaying like mad in the wind and if one of those was what we saw through our window, there were a few more left doing that mad dance. Would they fall? And considering the direction this one fell in, the possibility that they would fall on our house was almost one hundred percent. They were all over fifty feet tall and as much as our house was set back from the neighbor's fence, they could reach our roof. We had proof of that staring right through our windows. Did a weak tree fall? Or was it a healthy one? What was the chnce there were more weak trees? Or what if that really didn't matter?
Peering into the darkness through the window in our bedroom looking up these trees backlit by an eerie white sky, we could see them almost bend with the furious wind. And to me it seemed, one of the taller ones would fall straight through our roof into our living room. The one where we had our fireplace and the one where we had set up our beds.
I shared my concerns with Vincent and we decided to move into the family room near the kitchen. It was much smaller, but atleast to me, it seemed like it was safer than the living room. Mostly it seemed like it was out of the way of the trees.
So we dragged the mattresses, only two would fit there, and lined them up. Manny decided to sleep on the couch. It was close to ten o' clock by then. We wearily went to bed.
Vincent did another funny thing. He made us pack our bags one more time. Just in case a tree fell on the house and we had to leave. But I had to remind him that we were well and truly stuck. With icy roads all over, how would we drive? Where would we go? But we did pack, just for our peace of mind and left our bags by the garage door. By that time, I had hit rock bottom in my mind. And then I decided that if this is what God had in store for us, then this is what we would do. Trust in him and close our eyes in slumber.
But we barely slept, Vincent and I. Every wind gust had us lift our heads from the pillow and sharpen our ears for any scary noise. The creak of a tree breaking, the whoosh of a tree sailing through the air,the thud of a tree falling.This happened the entire night, but without any of these things happening.
Morning dawned and we were all alive and well, albeit a little wary of what we would find outside the window.
Can I tell you more in the next post?
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