Got hope?

There's no escaping the fact that the whole region--but especially Sioux County, and especially (again) Sioux Center and Orange City caught a hard, hard slap a couple of weeks ago when 100 mph straight winds came through and broke branches out of any tree older than a couple of years. What you can't escape as you walk gingerly through the destruction..is the grip of death. Yucch. 

This is kiddy-corner from the house we lived in for about thirty years, a place blessed (sort of) with three lindens, just about the most beautiful trees in town really, and tallest--real Joyce Kilmer signed. The only problem with entertaining them was having to clean up after them--like a cat who gets ornery around a sandbox. Dirty?--horrible. But beautiful. 

There's only one left now. They must be a disaster to clean up.

Here's what our old house, now lived in by the Matthews, another Dordt English prof. That gone tree is a maple. When my daughter graduated from college in 1998, she had her friends and their families over for a party. One of the dads had a greenhouse or a lawn business in Denver. We were standing outside on that front  porch together when I complained about that ancient maple, glaring stumps all over the place from other wind storms--"I really ought to take that thing down, I think," I muttered.

He looked at me as if I was nuts. "I know loads of people in Denver who'd give thousands of dollars for a tree like that," he told me. That made me far less crochety when, in the fall, maple leaves covered our entire corner of the block.

Orange City got nailed too, especially in their most iconic places.

 

So on Labor Day, my grandson and I, both sporting cameras, took off for Oak Grove Park, where, I was told, the devastation could still be noted. The advice was old; the place was pretty well cleaned up, all the roads sufficiently cleared so that we never had to turn around or even sneak by fallen branches. 

Found one that was worth a shot. Short roots got plenty of water, I suppose, but hindered the monster from getting his roots down far enough to hold off the velocity.

It's all about death really--kind of depressing, yet diligent in the way it stays with you, won't let you leave the scene of the crime. I'm glad they had most of it cleaned up.  Something sorrowful mostly. 

Here's one I had to put out of focus--all that green, a young tree actually, while over the river there in South Dakota, there's a really tall stump way up high in a shoreline cottonwood uncourteously stripped by unfeeling winds.

"Got milk?" the old commercial used to say. "Sure, sure," a guy might answer, his eye on those energetic sprouts. "Got hope?"

Maybe.