A giant tree crushed our house

No one was where they were supposed to be.

It was 5 pm on a Thursday and I'd taken a couple of hours off of work to run to the store. I drove home from the store through a terrible storm that whipped up seemingly from nowhere and fought to stay on the road through the wind and rain that poured down so hard my windshield wipers couldn't keep up with it. As I pulled into my driveway I realized something was wrong and the few breathless seconds it took to drive up, park and run into the house felt like forever. The giant white oak tree behind our house was down and covering the entire house. The tree was so large that branches and leaves were arched over the peak of the roof and showing on the front of the house. I knew without going inside that the back half of the house was crushed. The back half of the house where my husband and babies should have been sitting down for dinner because it was 5 pm. I hadn't gotten a phone call and my stomach dropped because I was afraid that I'd find my family dead under the tree in the dining room.

He answered immediately when I yelled entering the house and the sound came, not from the dining room, but instead from the nursery. This was one of the rare days when he was running late and instead of having both babies in high chairs at the table feeding them cereal and milk and some type of pureed vegetable, they were were still in the middle of diaper changes. There was no time to really feel relief past what hit me initially. This was a crisis and there were suddenly a huge number of things that needed to be done. The babies were secured in car seats and moved to a running car outside because we weren't sure how stable the house was or whether or not it would suffer more damage with the tree on it. Phone calls were hard to make because the storm was affecting available cell lines so we struggled to make outside contact while we feverishly worked inside. Gather up baby gear, try to move furniture out of the damaged rooms where water was pouring through gaping holes in the ceiling, load up money, firearms, prescriptions, clothes and anything else that needed immediate attention. I got a call out to my mom 500 miles away so she could report the damage to our insurance company and get us help immediately. My next call was to a friend who happened to be out of town on a consulting gig. I think he could hear the panic in my voice as I begged him to call anyone we knew for help. The third call was to 911 to get someone out to disconnect power lines and gas lines because they were both compromised. The firemen showed up first and after securing the power lines and making sure we weren't in imminent danger, helped move a freezer full of breast milk out of the demolished pantry so that I'd be able to continue to feed my kids. Our friends showed up second and in a flurry of activity working in the now dark house, packed up the entire contents of the nursery in trash bags and loaded up vehicles. By then I was overwhelmed and they effortlessly took over directing and packing and making sure I'd have what I needed immediately for my kids. Bins and bags and boxes were moved to a friend's garage nearby for temporary storage. A hotel room was secured and the kids were fed and changed and loved on while I took care of pumping and then went back to the house. A tree service had shown up, hired by the insurance company, to remove the tree from the house before it did more damage. They worked late into the the night swinging from cherry pickers with headlamps and chainsaws cutting down branches as large as most normal sized trees.

I don't think we really slept that night from the adrenaline. I was up early and scavenged breakfast from the hotel lobby and before it was fully light outside we were back at the house to survey the damage and see what else we could pull from the wreckage. The pantry/laundry room was destroyed. The dining room ceiling is down a foot or more lower than it ought to be and was really only saved by the three stack chimney, now leaning from the impact and weight of the massive tree. Bits of flue liner and bricks were scattered around the roof under tree branches and the fireplace insert was pushed out of the fireplace. A huge branch had pierced the roof of the office and was aimed down at the office chair where my husband normally sat. Ceiling tiles, wet insulation and bits of bark and leaves littered the desk and floor. The ceiling in the back porch was almost completely down and we're guessing that the only reason there was anything left of the back porch was because we'd put up plywood to enclose it a few years ago when we decided to use that space for storage. Water had run through the bathroom and kitchen and dining room and office and puddled in some spots and run down the walls and into the floor in other spots. All of the walls have a slight tilt to them having been pushed forward by the weight of the massive tree. Outside, most of the tree was still on the house and it wasn't long before the tree service showed up with two large trucks with grappling arms and a swarm of hard hat covered leather skinned men wielding chainsaws to chip away at the remaining limbs. Piles of branches and leaves that dwarf our truck started popping up all around the house. The trunk of the tree itself was too heavy to move and was pushed to the side a bit to get it off the house, bumping into the propane tank that is now going to need to be reset, if it can be moved at all.

The next few days were a blur of tree service men, a service company that helped us move and pack and store belongings from damaged rooms, more hurried packing and attempts to salvage belongings from rooms still wet from the storm. The insurance adjuster showed up on Saturday because no ordinary insurance guy would do - we required one who handles large claims because so much of our house was damaged. Then more packing and moving and getting lucky enough to be friends with the realtor who handed us keys to a three bedroom rental house just down the road so we had somewhere to move the babies that was close enough to keep track of our house. In the midst of this it was Rich's birthday that Saturday, Father's day on Sunday and the kids turned 6 months on Monday. We even managed to go to dinner one night because of someone who loves us enough to watch after the kids for us.

As bad as the damage is, as uncertain as things are right now because we're still waiting for the report from the structural engineer to get to the insurance adjuster so he can determine how much they're going to fix, as stressful as moving and trying to deal with the never ending list of things that must be attended to has been, we're lucky. Lucky that no one was where they were supposed to be that day. Lucky that Rich was running a few minutes late. Lucky that I'd taken a couple hours off work and wasn't sitting in the office like I should have been. Lucky that we have friends who arrive with one panicked phone call and swarm in to do whatever they can to help. Lucky that we happen to be friends with the realtor who just happened to have a house down the road from us that would work. The rest of this mess is just stuff and stuff can be replaced.