A chorus line of naked ladies…

Beginning at about 8 pm Sunday evening, we were without power for about 10 hours because of a strong thunderstorm that moved through the area with very powerful straight-line winds that broke a lot of trees. The dead tree alongside our driveway, which Richard has been eyeballing for some time and talking about “having someone come in and take it out before it falls and hits one of the cars,” did indeed come down. It fell behind the cars parked at the garage, at an angle, and did not hit anything.

Our TV-watching plans were set aside. We got in my car, which could still be backed up and turned around despite the dead tree, and took a tour of the neighborhood to see who did and did not have power. We didn’t get very far. There was a tree blocking the road just past Tony’s house -- he did not have power -- so Richard executed a perfect 5-point turn on the one-lane road to get us back headed the other direction.

We took a left at the “T” with gravel road right in front of Tony’s house and immediately saw that this road was also blocked by a tree. We could see that some people further down the road did have power.

We came back, and by the light of the Coleman lantern, I started reading him the John Grisham novel, “The Confession,” and after a couple of chapters, he decided he better fire up the generator to try to keep the refrigerator cool because the power probably was not going to come on right away.  He fired it up and saw that it needed gasoline so at about 10 pm we made a trip to the convenience store and ran the generator for another hour before we went to bed.

We got up to a quiet house Monday morning, and fired up the generator again. And at 7 AM, just about the time my laptop computer battery was running out of juice, the power surged back on. Hallelujah! And the day commenced.

The good thing about the storm is that it broke the heat wave and the drought for our area and we got some lovely rain over the next few days that we needed badly. Everything that was looking so sad and tired suddenly sprang to life again, and up popped the naked ladies.

Amaryllis or “surprise lilies” are a more polite name for them. We were bewildered during the first spring we were here to see the thick, lush vegetation at about the same time the daffodils and tulips came up, but no flowers.





And then, surprise!