This is a photo of my two silver maples looking south on Cedar Street. The sidewalks have a brass plaque fixed into the concrete that show the WPA built them in 1940. My house was built in 1903, so I can't imagine how old the two trees can be. I have lost two major trees like this the past ten years. I have one more still living on the other side of my house. One of the trees the city took out and in 1997 extremely strong winds took another down into my yard with the neighbors walnut tree laying on top of it. The tree behind this front one is where a raccoon mother comes into town every spring and has her babies. Once they get a certain age, off they go back to the woods.
Three years ago a tornado was coming this way up this street. It is Cedar street and all that we could hear was this freight train sound. You can see where the tornado took a left, right where the new house was built. That whole end of the street has mostly new houses. The tornado took a left there and followed up behind the row of houses on the left of the street going out into a farm field. There were three large trusses that people buy to build the roofs of their houses. and garages. One was laying on the ground just down the way, another to the right on my neighbors garage and the other one was hanging in one of the trees you see on the left of the picture. They were very large trusses from some destroyed garage and they were big. They were dropped from the sky. No tree that was the size of our silver maples withstood the tornado, so we were fortunate. Both our silver maples and our house survived. We did have two pine trees on the other side of this block that were snapped off at the base but everything else was untouched.
The big silver maples have been around through a lot of history. These two need a trim job and some of these days they will get it. We have a lot of birds, owls and squirrels that frequent these trees. I will hate to see them go as they give so much shade, but someday they will probably just fall down.
2 comments:
They are wonderful trees and they look wise and I am sure if they could talk, they would have many stories to tell!
I could not imagine a tornado coming down the street, oh how horrible that would be!
I hope they have a lot of more years in them, they truly are beautiful!
I've seen and been in a few tornadoes and I'll never forget that sound. The closest one was directly above our house out in the country outside of Woodward - it never touched down, as far as our neighbors saw, but it took most of the shingles, all of the smaller trees, parts of our fence, and threw the trampoline across the field.
I was at work watching the news when they showed live video of the massive tornado making its way toward Woodward. By then, I was living in Urbandale. I called everyone I could to let them know - no one had been watching the news or heard a tornado until I called them. Awesome. SCARY!!!
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