Things That Go Boom

At around 1 pm today I was sitting in my room when I heard a great cracking noise and felt the ground beneath me shake. I've heard branches fall in our yard before and assumed that this was what caused the clamor. I shuffled into the hall and took a peak out the window to confirm my suspicions. I then called my mom with the news.

But on closer inspection, I found that it was not simply a branch. A one hundred year old tree had fallen down into my front yard from accross the street. Its trunk was at least the thickness of my fridge, and it completely barrackaded the road and sidewalks on either side. In the oak's fall, it missed a car by two feet and tore two of my neighbor's trees in half, its top end (and whatever chunks from other trees it managed to take out with it) landing squarely in my yard.

I spent a solid half hour in awe of the thing. People heard it crash from 4 blocks away and came to look. We all stood around, stared and said things that would have made Captain Obvious proud. ("Gosh. It's big." "Did you hear that? It was loud." "Boy, is it huge or what?") The roots just snapped. One man, a worker putting in a walk-way down the road, pointed at the spot where tree and root split and said, in all serioiusness, that this happened because "they didn't dig a deep enough hole when they first planted the thing." I begged to differ. The rain has paid us almost daily visits for more than a week, and the soil was simply too soft to hold the plants girth once the wind picked up. A neighbor came by later said that the tree had been planted when the house it stood before was built, a little under a hundred years ago.

Sad story. I took a long last look at the moss growing on its bark and the ivy climbing its trunk and felt suitably melancholy. But I'm squishy like that.

The city is currently taking chain saws to the poor old dear and pilling the branches onto our yards for the insurance company to deal with.