a mighty wind

I feel a bit like Dorothy today. It is incredibly windy here in Louisville: tornadically so. The doors at the entrance of the bank are being swept up in the gusts, and keep slamming open and shut.

Out one window the sky is slate grey. Out another is sunshine and a puffy cloud.

The local paper reports that we can expect wind gusts as high as 50 mph.

I'm starting to have flashbacks of last year. I might need to take a mental health day, or a little white anxiety pill.

See, September 14, 2008 is a day which will live in infamy in the minds of Louisvillians. Hurricane Ike, over 1000 miles away from us, brought us a gift in the form of 81 mph winds. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon until the wind started to whistle. Trees bent as if bowing at dignitaries. My new husband and I watched from the living room window. Having barely bested Tropical Storm Hanna while on our Myrtle Beach honeymoon (we'd been back less than one week!) I wondered if the universe might be trying to tell us something about the fate of our marriage.

Being the pansy that I am when it comes to impending natural disasters, I hid in the bathroom with my cell phone and cigarettes, but my heart rate escalated without the help of nicotine. The day was so calm -- no rain, no foreboding darkened sky. Just all encompassing wind, sweeping through and at the same time sticking around. I thought of the worse: our roof being ripped off, sharp objects turned into projectiles and hurtling through the picture window and bursting into the living room. Fallen trees.

A little antsy at my post on the ledge of the tub, I returned to the living room just in time to see the tree in our front yard bow out. A fairly hefty branch met its end on the hood of my husband's Cavalier. My face fell: I had been on the verge of telling him to go move the car.

Hubs went out to survey the damage while I cried a little and took pictures from the front door. The power on our street flickered and faded. I was fearful that the rest of the tree was going to come down on top of him, but he soon convinced me to get out there in the midst of it to take photos of the damage for insurance purposes.

The Cavalier started without any problem and he decided that I should sit in the driver's seat and put it in reverse while he lifted the branch from the hood. Clearly, the damage was mostly cosmetic.

Since we were without power -- and thus unable to watch news coverage and find out what was going on in town -- we decided to venture out (in my car!) to take in the sights. On the a.m. radio, a deejay warned that it was best to stay inside unless you absolutely just had to get out of the house for some reason. This warning didn't detour the Murphys!

All over Louisville, trees were down. Many were completetly uprooted. The destruction was massive, the devistation alarmingly obvious.

I didn't take this photo to the left, but it absolutely sums up what we saw that afternoon, again and again as we wound our way around street after street of utter mayhem.

You can understand why, as I write this, my palms sweat a little and I keep looking up from the monitor to survey what is going on outside my window at this very moment, as the trees again do their eerie dance.

At best, I pray that we don't lose power for seven days this time around. What ensued that week deserves a blog post all its own.