Holy Wind, Batman...

I fear wind. Have a tree fall on your house during a freak micro burst and see how much you love it from then on.

About 5 or 6 years ago, on Mother's Day morning, the hubby and I were sleeping soundly when the wind picked up in what we have dubbed "our Vortex" in our backyard. It lasted about 5 to 10 seconds but, that was all it took to knock a huge oak tree from our backyard onto our house. Fortunately, as witnessed by our then next door neighbor who had been playing with his kids outside in his backyard when he saw the tree get knocked onto our house from the wind, a branch bent upon initial impact with our house and knocked the tree off to the side of our house only making 2 rather small holes in our house. One was something between the size of a baseball and football on our roof and the other hole was about the size of tennis ball on the side, if memory serves. The majority of our damage was to the fence between us and our neighbors and our gate to our portion of the fence.

So, let me just make this abundantly clear: If it weren't for that branch bending and knocking the tree away from our house, it might very well have landed on our house, possibly separating mine and my hubby's head from our bodies and I wouldn't be here telling you all about it today.

The wind last night gave me flashbacks of that morning and the extremely rude way in which we were awakened. The sound of a tree falling on one's house is a sound that you will never forget.

The reason that we call our backyard a Vortex is because, we tend to get massive winds back there. The wind seems to double in intensity between my house, my two next door neighbors and one more neighbor 2 houses down. I don't know why it gets so bad between our 4 houses. It just does and we have all talked about it a lot. So, I guess you could call us the Vortex 4.

Finally, just a little funny note here. After that huge crack-bang-thud, I got out of bed and went to the window to see what the heck all the racket was about. I peered through my blinds and said, "A tree just fell on our house." Hubby then asked me, "Which tree?" To which my only response was, "The big one!"