The storm came and did its thing, shaking loose limbs, chimney pipes, barrels, and entire trees, in some cases. Some friends of ours had a Doug Fir with a five foot base fall on their house. The tree had dry rotted so much from the inside that there was only four inches of live wood holding it up on the northeast side. It’s an amazing sight.

Fortunately, they work up in Salt Lake and weren’t home at the time. Thought the house itself wasn’t damaged heavily, the roof took a hit and some damage and it would have been pretty scary to hear all that falling and impact action.

Their home was built around the same time as ours, so it was built with some huge old-growth timbers. If that tree had fallen on a modern truss-built house, it would have shivered from one end to the next, I’m sure. As it is, it will probably need a bit of repairing and perhaps only a very small amount of structural review and shoring.

It’ll take a crane to lift the behemoth off of the roof, so we couldn’t do much else yesterday besides watch someone else from the neighborhood nail a tarp to the roof and tree to keep snow out of the unbelievably small hole made by the huge tree’s unfortunate demise.

Life is going on pretty routinely, otherwise. Tragedy happens while small miracles accompany, and chances are we’ll see how we handle both.