Ike

This was our first hurricane experience. After losing power at 11:30 p.m. Friday, we huddled down in our interior bathroom with cushions, blankets, a battery powered radio, snacks, and our dog Shiloh (who slept through the entire storm.) The wind had been picking up and sounded like a winter blizzard to me before we went to our safe room. The room we were in was very quiet, although we could certainly tell that the wind became much worse than earlier in the night; we started hearing loud cracks from outside around 2 a.m. We listened to the radio all night and dozed from time to time. I certainly didn't know what to expect from a hurricane but felt safe and secure in our little room, so I didn't feel overly frightened.

When we finally emerged around 7:30 Saturday morning, however, I wondered if I should have felt a bit more scared!

This was the view from our upstairs window. All the Bradford pears that line the entrance to our little neighborhood had sustained heavy damage. Neighbors were already out there cleaning them off the road. David went and helped them.


After being cleaned up:

The pecan trees in the neighborhood park also lost a lost of limbs, although hopefully most of them will survive. I doubt that we will be gathering pecans this November as we have the last two years, however! Most of the green pods had been blown off.

More from the park:

This is the view from our bedroom. David made sure we took everything off the walls throughout the house and covered all the furniture in plastic, just in case any windows broke. As it turned out, no windows broke, but you can see that one of our nice shade trees came down. Look closely and you can see its upper branches resting on our window screens! That was a close one.

Here is the demise of our lovely Bradford pear, on the left. It had been as tall as the one on the right. I was sorry to see it go, although I will be able to plant more flowers there now that the shade is gone.

David insisted on sawing off the branches by hand. Hopefully he'll take my advice and find a chainsaw for the major limbs and the trunk!

Another small tree over our wall:

Surprise! The neighbor's banana tree has fruit hanging over our fence...David may be tempted to try it out.

Shiloh was happy to help by stripping leaves off of branches:

A lovely sunset and cool front had moved in by Saturday evening:

We were without power for 2.5 days, but it wasn't that bad. We'd frozen containers full of ice when we heard the storm was coming so we could save some of our food, and I'd baked a bunch of muffins the night before. We actually enjoyed the peaceful evenings reading by candlelight and slept quite well after all the yard cleanup we'd been doing!

When we got our power back, we headed over to the neighborhood grocery store for milk, and fortunately it was open and had power. A security guard was monitoring how many people entered the store, which kind of made us chuckle to see in our suburban neighborhood. The store was restocking their perishables but did have milk (something very important to David because of how much cereal he eats)!

We're thankful that God kept us safe in the storm and provided cool weather afterwards. We'r also praying for everyone else who was affected by the storm. Natural disasters seem so much more real now that we've gone through such a big one ourselves. Thanks for keeping us in your prayers and for checking in on us!