… Then Your Luck Runs Out

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives, then your luck runs out. The news cycle since yesterday afternoon has been dominated by the Oklahoma tornado. Like Joplin two years earlier, a monster storm has flattened another plains community. Many people have been killed, many more have been injured and even more people have survived this storm with only the clothes on their backs, losing all of their worldly possessions. Possessions can be replaced that’s what insurance is for. Most of the injured will recover. For those who were tragically lost, we are left to mourn them. What else can we do? I don’t know whether these large storms are becoming more destructive and frequent or whether the media has just become more adept at capitalizing on them. I do know that our own storm damage in the last few years has increased remarkably.

We’ve lived in this house for almost thirty years and only in the last consecutive two years have we had to make any storm damage claims. Maybe, we’ve been lucky and now our luck has run out. Last night the same storm front that devastated the Sooner state rolled through Saint Louis. There were no tornadoes here, but there were lashing winds and plenty of lightning. We lost a tree branch off the last of our Silver maples. It dropped neatly between the Prius and the young Red maple that replaced our storm lost fir-tree. It came to rest only a couple of feet from our front living room windows. Anne had been sitting on the couch beneath these windows at the time. We were lucky. The next morning, I made quick work of the downed branch, cutting it up into a small pile. Today was refuse trash day, so I couldn’t put the branches out for pickup. After work, I didn’t put them in the trash cans for yard waste pickup, because tonight we are expecting another round of storms. Tomorrow will do just fine.