On Irene, Unwelcome Guest:

The flooding rain wasn’t bad enough. The high winds took an additional toll. The storm damage came further inland than first thought.

First, I am thankful that we are safe and unharmed. (At last count forty dead and countless injured.)

Second, We now have electricity after over a day and a half of none. And the phone is back now too. (Many others will have no electric for days to come. And then there are the ones who lost their homes.)

Third, Not one of all the trees that came down hit our house or car.

Fourth, the large pumpkins themselves are undamaged, but they will not be growing any further as their vines and leaves have been.

As to the over all damage:

We lost most of the garden. The corn is flat, the tomatoes all dropped from the plants. More than half of the apples and pears have dropped from the trees. A lot of the leaves left on the plants still alive, like the lettuce, have been shredded.















One of the two flattened corn crops.















Some of the many tomatoes we picked up off of the ground.

Most of the food that was in the refrigerator needed to be thrown out. In our 20+ cubic foot chest freezer, the top third of all in it started to thaw out. And some of that completely thawed.

It took almost two days for the birds to come back, but the amount of dead ones found after it was all over was a bit unsettling. (Broken necks, wings or both.) There were also an amount of drowned rodents. Pockets of the smell of death hang about in spots in the woods presumably drowned in their dens underground.

The house lost some shingles from the roof. The wind driven rain came in, under and around through the cracks around the windows and doors. The gutters and down spouts will have to be re-hung.

We are spending every moment we can processing and canning as much of the garden goods as possible to recoup what we can.

After that we have a lot of outside clean up to do.