THE STORM THAT KNOCKED DOWN TREES, by Nicky

Friday night last week we had a really horrible, extremely destructive storm!  It happened the night after we had just already had a frightening storm on Thursday night, so it was definitely not pleasant getting scared out of our wits for two nights in a row.  Mom knew the storm was coming because she heard about it in the weather forecast, but she just casually went to bed anyway and went right to sleep, as usual.  I can't believe she does stuff like that!

But then, about 2:00 a.m., we dogs realized that the storm was coming because we could hear the distant thunder and feel the change in the atmospheric pressure, and we knew that Mom should not just go on sleeping when there was so much danger approaching.  So we began to pace and pant and drool, and Barry jumped on and off the bed, which he always does during storms.  And right away Mom got the message that something awful was happening!

Anyway, the storm proceeded to make a ton of thunder and lightning (which makes Mom nervous, too, although she won't admit it).  And Mom decided that since she couldn't sleep with everything going on, she should just go downstairs and feed Carson, the kitten, so she did.  Then we all went back to bed, and the storm finally moved on, and we fell asleep.

The next morning, Mom took Piper out in front of our house to get her to pee, and Mom looked down the street to the next block, and she saw that the street there was totally blocked by a tree that fell down during the storm.  Then a little later, we heard a bunch of chain saws and shredders, and we thought they took away the tree.

But on Sunday morning, Mom was shocked to see that the tree was still there!  That's when she decided it was time to walk the dogs.  So she took me down there to see what was going on.  I was somewhat flummoxed to see a tree lying in the street, because that is not where trees are supposed to be.  We couldn't even walk on the sidewalks on either side of the street.  We had to go through people's yards so that we could get around all the tree debris and gawk at it properly.

First of all, we realized that it wasn't even a whole tree that fell down in the street.  It was just a huge branch of a tree.  And it went all the way across a yard and the street, and it blocked some driveways, and it hit a man's car, which was a shiny blue Mercedes.  There was a woman out there also gawking and taking pictures of the tree limb, and she said the man who owned the car had only just bought it a week ago.  I guess that man feels like he is having very bad luck right now!

Then while we were there, some guys came to cut up the tree limb.  They had a thing that Mom said is called a "cherry picker."  I don't know why they used a cherry picker, since the branch that fell down was off an oak tree and not a cherry tree.  But I guess they know what they are doing because they make a living doing it.

Anyway, after we went past the huge oak branch, we suddenly saw that there was another tree that fell down during the storm, except it had already been cut up into chunks.  This second tree was a silver maple that got uprooted and landed right on the corner of someone's house!  That would be a scary thing to happen -- maybe even scarier than lightning and thunder!  I certainly don't want our big, huge oak tree in the back yard to fall on our house because we might all get smashed to death if it did!

So after we saw the maple tree chunks, we knew what the people with chain saws had been doing on Saturday.  And also we saw that the corner of the roof where the tree hit it had been patched.  While we were gawking at the remains of the maple tree, a man backed his car up to one of the pieces of tree trunk, and he said he got permission to take it home because he wanted to make a seat out of it.  Mom said she thought it looked really heavy, and the man said he thought so, too.

Then he tried to get it over closer to his car, but he couldn't even do that, let alone lift it into his car.  Mom did not offer to help him pick up the chunk of wood because she did not want to hurt her back.  Apparently, the man decided not to hurt his back either, because he just got into his car and drove away.

Well, that's the story of our fierce, tree-killer storm.  I hope we don't have to go through anything like that again soon because it is almost more than a dog can deal with.  Mom said the good part is that at least we didn't lose our electricity, so I guess that's something, but it doesn't seem like very much to me!