a mighty wind

We recently had an unusually warm (78 degrees) and very windy (44 mph) day.    It was the kind of day that you could feel the wind buffeting your car around on the road while driving.

Lonnie and I had been to visit my parents and just as we were walking out their door to leave, we heard a big "CRACK"  and saw a large tree breaking off near the edge of their woods.

I figured we would have more downed trees when we got back to our house.  There were a couple of them, but this one had been leaning already.  A Sassafras.

The other was a fairly tall pine near an area we recently had cleared.  Of course it had to fall perfectly into the cleared area so it can't just be ignored.

Someone (me) forgot to latch this screen door to the screen porch and the wind whipped it back and forth until it was demolished.

These dead trees had fallen during an earlier rainy spell over the winter.

This apple tree had partly fallen years ago but kept growing. The branches got so heavy on one side from trying to reach for the sun that the whole tree went down completely, also while the ground was saturated.

I have been trimming off the smaller branches and taking them to the burn pile.

So, there is a lot of wood to be sawed up and dealt with.  

I wish I had one of those big wood chippers. I could turn all this into mulch!