The Big Storm

 On September 2 2026, we got hit by a bad storm.  It's been really stressful, and now that it's been more than a week, I would like nothing more than to forget about the whole thing.  But Chad and I like to keep records of these things, so that we can look back and remember what happened in our lives.  So here's a story of what happened.

I had heard early in the day that we would possibly have bad storms, so I made sure to get the laundry done, get dinner made, go pick all of the veggies in the garden, get loose things out of the yard like the plastic chairs and such.  And for extra precaution, we got our cat carriers out of storage and had them sitting in the dining room.  Doing this made them easy to get to if we needed them, but it also helps the cats get used to them a little better so they're not instantly afraid when the carriers come out.

 We made it through most of the storm with nothing very interesting happening.  A little drizzle, a little wind.  I saw on the radar that the tail end of the big storm was going to pass over us around 7pm, and then it would pretty much be clear the rest of the night.  So we sat down in the living room to wait out the little bit of storm that would hit us.  Dorian was on the back of the couch, and Velvet was on Chad's desk.

It grew dark, and it began to rain.  Suddenly something hit the window, maybe heavy rain, maybe hail, and it was fierce.  Then we heard a loud whistle, and the wind shifted directions abruptly.  Then a loud noise came, and the cats began to run.  I looked over the couch and the window next to the woodstove was just gone, and the cell shade had been pulled down and was sucked right out the window.  The direction of the air was flowing such that air was leaving through the now totally open window, so no water was getting in.  

I got up and checked on the cats, and we decided to pack them up and move to the basement because we were so confused about what was going on.  Were we having a tornado?  By then it was calm again, but I was scared and didn't want to wait around to see if more damage would happen.  So we pulled the cats out from under the beds, and packed them into their carriers.  We sat down in the basement for maybe 10-15 minutes, until we could see on the radar that the storm had totally passed us.  Then we brought them back up and closed them into our bedrooms so that we could figure out what was happening with the window.

This is what the window looked like.  This was taken from inside the house, looking out to our back yard.  It had blown out and landed in the grass, almost totally intact.  It didn't break the glass or bust the wood or anything, it just blew right out.

 

We decided to bring it in and figure out what to do with it in the morning.

 Then we got to work trying to figure out what to do about the huge gaping hole in our house.  Water wasn't getting in, but bugs were!  So first we tacked up a sheet to keep the worst of the critters out:

 We first tried to cut a piece of plywood to fit into the hole, and got the wood cut to size before we realized that we would have a really hard time holding it into place to nail it up.  We didn't want to put nails into our pretty wood trim, and we couldn't nail it up from the outside because the ground is so uneven right under that window.  Finally we decided to abandon the plywood and just staple up a plastic drop cloth and reinforce it a little with cardboard.

 Halfway through this ordeal, I looked outside and saw flashing lights, green and amber, down the road.  What I could see made me think there was a tree fallen across the road, so Chad and I grabbed a flashlight and a chainsaw, and ran out to see what we could do.  By then the flashing lights were gone, and when we got halfway up our road, I could see that whatever had fallen was no longer in the road, so we stomped back home and finished up our window work.  

By this point, is was after midnight.  We didn't think we could trust the cats with the plastic over the window, so we set it up so they could have their food, water, and litter in the back rooms, and tried to get some sleep.  

At first light, Chad and I got outside to assess the damages.  The first thing we did was walk around the house to check for damage to the roof, and thankfully that seems to have fared just fine.  There were however shingles all over our yard, all over the fields, front and back, east and west.  Our oldest shed had been hit pretty hard, and lost about half the shingles on the roof and a good portion of shingles from the sides.  One of the other older sheds lost a few shingles as well.

 Then we got to walking up and down the road to assess our trees.  The first thing I saw was my favorite apple tree had been hit pretty hard.

 

 

This is the tree that produced some of the nicest apples on our property, sweet but sprightly, small and pretty.

 I had already picked a bushel of apples from the tree but there was still a lot left that needed picked.  As sad as I was to see the damage, all is not lost.  We had been planning on pruning the tree pretty heavily, and so mother nature saved us some trouble.  The part of the tree still standing will probably produce a bumper crop next year.

 Across the street from our house, there are two stands of trees in the field.  Each stand has a large tree down.

 

On past our house is our neighbor Janet, who is in her 80s.  She had a lot of damage, including to the (abandoned) trailer park her family owns across the street from her house.  There was even a tree across the road, which is why I was seeing the green and amber flashing lights the night before.  The city had gotten right up here and had it out of the road.

 

There are some large branches broken in the patch of trees that sits between our properties.

 

We found her walking around in her yard too, looking at the damage.  She had 6 or 7 large locust trees down in her front yard.  It's a miracle nothing happened to her house.

 

We talked a bit, and Chad helped her set up some of her garden gnomes that had fallen over, then we went on our way.  As a side note, her kids and grandkids have been working like mad this last week and have that whole mess almost totally cleaned up.  

 On the other side of our property, near our other neighbors, several more trees were down.  One came down by the neighbors' spring water barrel.  It fell toward our property and knocked down a couple of trees on our land, including a large standing dead tree.

 Next we checked out the garden.  I only looked from the outside, because I couldn't get myself to go in and see how bad it was.  I had too much else going and didn't have enough energy left to deal with it.  But it was clear standing outside that the trellises were mostly knocked over and the plants had taken quite a beating.

 Chad called the window people that had installed our windows last year, and they were able to come out in the afternoon.  Believe it or not, they were able to pop the old window right back in.  It has almost no damage.

 But Chad was pretty done with these windows.  The window guys confirmed that they're pretty low quality, hardly attached into the hole at all.  We already didn't like them because they are hard to open and close, are super drafty, and have water damage on the wood.  So while they were here putting the window back in, Chad asked them to measure the windows for replacements.  We'll get those put in in about a month.

We still had electricity and internet, but lots of people around didn't.  Chad even got a call from our internet providers and asked if we were using a generator.  We saw lots of utility trucks driving up and down the road, electric and internet.  Also out and about was the town trucks.  They were going along and cleaning up all of the branches and trees that had fallen close to the road, including the one by the neighbors' spring water.

 According to our neighbor, the town took the top off the tree, stripped all the branches off leaving just a 15 foot trunk, and stood it back up in its hole!  Not sure what good that will do, but I suppose now at least there isn't a huge hole in the ground.

Around noon, we saw an electric truck parked out front of our garage, so Chad went out to talk to them.  They warned him that they would be turning the electricity off shortly.  They needed to fix some lines up the hill from us, so they were turning it off at our pole.  Great.  I had put a loaf of bread into my bread machine about an hour earlier, and it had two hours to go before it was done.  I decided to chuck it into the fridge and figured I could make it into rolls later.  I hadn't gotten around to making lunch yet, and because we didn't have any bread (that's why I was making it), we ended up eating crackers and peanut butter and raisins for lunch because I didn't want to open the fridge with the power out.  We ended up being without power until 4pm, the amount of time experts say you can have your fridge off before you have to throw everything inside away.

 We thought everything would go back to normal after the power was back on.  The window was replaced, the power was on, our house was ok, everyone was safe.  But then Dorian was acting weird the next morning.  He acted like he couldn't use the litter box.  Uh oh.  He's had a history of UTIs and urinary crystals, which can be deadly in cats.  And here it was, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.  Our vet normally has Saturday hours, but not this weekend.  Thank heavens we have an emergency vet here in town, and they were able to get him right in that morning.  They couldn't find anything wrong with him, no blockages or signs of UTI, but they gave us some meds and special food to help with any problems he might be having so that he could get through the weekend.  

As far as I can tell, his problem was that he was very very scared.  It took me hours a day to coax him out from under the bed, and even at night when everyone was asleep and he could feel more safe, he still wouldn't come out.  But eventually, with patient coaxing and lots of treats, we got him to come out and become more comfortable, and he started using the litter box normally.  

Chad wanted to see what was going on up in our hills, so he took his chainsaw and his safety gear and walked up to the Narrow Gauge trail.  There were several smaller trees down across it, and one large cluster down at a fork in the trail that blocks all four ways.

 

He's slowly cutting up the trees and piling them up off to the side of the trail.  Eventually, we're going to cut this wood up for firewood.  My guess is there's enough wood just in this cluster to heat us for a whole winter.

A few days later, I finally went to the garden.  It's still hard to go out there, and I haven't actually done any work to fix anything yet.  We definitely got hail that night, because all of the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, peppers, green beans, kale, even the raspberries are covered in little pockmarks  or small bruises.  It ruined the zucchinis, peppers and cherry tomatoes, but the large tomatoes can be saved because they're big enough that I can just cut the bad spots out.  Only about half of the green beans were hit by the hail, so I picked what I could and I'll just till the plants in sometime next week.  Of course the root crops are fine, the carrots and the rutabagas, and the leaf crops will bounce back in no time.  The berry plants got a beating, but as long as their roots are healthy, they will bounce back next year.  

So there's what happened.  We didn't get hit by a tornado, but a lot of towns around New York did.  Our neighbors and I think we probably got hit by a microburst.  We still have a lot of work to do to pick up from the storm, including cutting down trees, putting up shingles, and pulling down broken trellises.  But at least we are safe and healthy, and that's all that matters.