Dear Friends,
Your indulgence for a brief aside from our usual Skidompha messaging, but whoa! That was a storm-and-a-half! I hope you are all alright out there and that your power is back on, or at least scheduled to be back on very soon. I guess it shows I should not be lulled into a sense of calm by False Spring.
A brief recap of Saturday night: I knew things were going pear-shaped around 5:30pm or so when I stepped outside to look around and heard the tell-tale bacon-spitting sound of frozen precip hitting the trees and snow, and seeing pine needles icing up and pine branches beginning to hang low. Around 8pm I lost power-I can’t believe it held on for that long! Later that evening Pumpkin and I were woken by the crash of all crashes as a very large pine branch broke and fell on the roof, shaking the whole house (This is sounding a little like Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald). I remember hearing the far off snapping sound first, followed by the gentle, sliding collisions on other branches as it fell. In my sleepy haze the second or two before the strike I thought, “Gee, was that a branch? It’s taking a while to come down, like maybe it was pretty high up there. I hope it doesn’t hit the house. That could be bad.” Of course it hit the house, and Pumpkin and I both hit the ceiling upon impact. Worse, stepping outside, I heard nearly the continuous and frightening gunshot-like sounds of other trees and branches snapping and falling in the woods. Scary stuff.
The good news, Pie and I are fine, and likely did a lot better than many others, and for that I am grateful. But as I write this I hear from family in Minnesota that they may get up to 16″ of snow, we may get rain through Friday, and that we are transitioning from El Niño to ENSO-neutral, and likely to La Niña later this summer. Never a dull moment.
Be well,
Matthew
Matthew Graff
Executive Director
Skidompha Public Library