Friday was a half-day, and we made the most of it. We ran some errands and then we popped over to the Delellos to borrow Anne of Green Gables (the quintessential Canadian chick flick/arty-right-brained epic). We took a break in the late afternoon, and we ran into our neighbor who told us (in a calm, but serious tone) that there was a tornado warning and that we should get inside. Sky was a little green. We headed home.

About the time we were back in the house, ensconced in the den with Anne Shirley and her adopted family, wind started whipping, buckets of rain started falling, lights flickered, and the power backup started clicking. It was pretty nasty for about 15-20 minutes and then calmed down. We wrapped up our marathon around 11:00. Didn’t think much more about it.

Saturday, I went on a walk over toward Faris Road, about a half mile from the house. There, I saw the tops of trees that had been twisted off about twenty feet up the trunk. A swath of downed trees about fifty feet wide and several hundred feet long. Full-grown evergreens uprooted. A merge sign lifted out of the ground and laid flat where it had stood. Miraculously, I did not see a single building damaged by a tree.

In the midst of all this, I found a stick—a bruised reed. It was about an inch thick and about 30 inches long. It had been snapped out of the middle of a larger branch, evidenced by the clean breaks at both ends. It had apparently been struck by lightning, loosening the bark, and then stripped cleanly of its bark from top to bottom (leaving just a little bit of bark on a twig that forked off). I found it laying in green-green grass, among the rubble.

There was no report of a tornado, by the way. Zufall, our resident weather geek says it was probably a microburst—sort of down-firing wind thing. I don’t know. But what an amazing picture of condensed, sovereign, creatorial power—in reverse!