It's 4:45 PM and the Noon Whistle Just Blew!

Considering a possible pollinator plant for 'Honeycrisp' is crabapple, I guess this pattern of fruiting is not unusual in this apple.  I thought the winds would have taken them.

Okay, I live in such a small town we still have a noon whistle, and it is still being blown at noon.  Quaint, I know.  There are still people who work here in town until they hear it and then go home for lunch.  If the wind is from the right direction, I can actually hear it out at the farm five miles from town.

Today, however, it tells me precisely how long the power was out.  Sometime between midnight and 3 AM, the wind began to howl.  Handsome Son is somewhere near the Canadian border fishing.  For those brief moments of consciousness, I debated getting up and moving to his futon on the lower level and farther from the possible fall zone of the top of my white pine...or the branch broken off but totally lodged (for a while, at least) about 50 feet up.  (I know it's broken off and dead; I get glimpses of its brown-ness from time to time on the summer breeze.)

I debated, for those few brief moments, had passing thoughts about the merits of Code Red (our county's emergency notification call service), and then...fell fast asleep...until sometime around 5 AM when I realized my fan was not doing its shimmy shake, and the only light was from "the light from yonder window break".  Luckily, not actually broken, but my head felt that way, two aspirin were in order.

Two aspirin and juice and a call to the power company to let them know and surprise-- someone had already called--itself unusual.  Then, back to bed.

Horrific dreams waiting for me. 

In the first, my boxer, Cinnamon, Had been attacked by a huge fly, probably the one that carries elephantiasis.  It had laid its larva in her sleek hide and now they were hatching and she was up the stairs to the loft to jump onto my bed and to anxiously display her swirling swarm of airborne abusers.  It seemed real.

The second short dream seemed equally true.  Handsome Son was home from his fishing trip because he missed me and need to impart some urgent message, "Wake up, Mom..."

Shortly before 8 AM, the quiet of the village, the geese, and cranes, were interrupted by the persistent growl of more and more gas generators powering up, and the sound of sawing.  There was lots of sawing.

'Arthur Kroll'-- does this bud pattern look familiar? This is one flowering stalk!

'Frizzled Lace' gladiola, purchased from Brent and Becky's Bulbs.  The flower doesn't even look like a gladiola!

 My house and garden had no damage.  I could take these pretty pictures.  A clump of 5 oak leaves was laying on my lawn.  I stared at it like a foreign thing trying to come up with the closest oak to my property and drawing an absolute blank-- Oak Street?

A half block to the north, nearly every tree was broken off or uprooted, the tops of roofs, deer stands, unanchored sheds were shoved down road ways and flipped like a toys,  Sheet metal was wrapped around stop signs, glass windows on the east sides shattered by debris.  The official word is no tornado, just straight line wind sheer.  No one was injured.  Power has been restored, in almost record time. 

Almost all is well, with the exception of yet another major blow to the number of trees in our village.  The sawing and chipping will continue for some days.  There will be insurance paperwork for some.  Others, repairs if they can afford to make them.

My white pine and I feel very lucky.