Mother Nature shows her power ...

This past week has flown by and yet, I've gone nowhere. The snow that was predicted arrived. The first days were fun as it seemed that our house was the meeting point for the family. I don't mind that. It reminds me of the past, when it was my kids that were the young ones, leaving all the snow covered clothing in their wake. Now it is my grand kids. The puddles of melted snow on the floor will always dry up and go away, the memories created at times like these, will be with me forever.

We had some really great sledding days, and yes, I even went out for a bit on one of those days. Then we woke to an ice storm. There was already 22 inches of snow on the ground and now the ice was coating it. The trees took on an unnatural look, though it was beautiful. The leaves, limbs, and needles were all coated in ice, some of them are coated in ice still. It was if I was looking at the beauty of nature through a glass covering. It was silent outside as nothing was moving.

Then it started. The trees breaking from the combined weight of the ice and snow. Standing outside, there was an eerie silence then off in the distance I could hear the pop of the branch as it broke and the crash of several more branches that were broken as it made its way to the forest floor. Another would break, once again changing the silence to a moment of sound, quickly to dissipate once more. There were no cars running, no birds singing, no cows mooing, there was nothing but silence broken by destruction. This was something that Mother Nature had manifested, no man could make it stop, no man could fix this, hug all the trees that you wanted to, they were still going to break and crash to the ground.

It was a lonely sound, this popping and crashing. It was magnified by the very quiet that surrounded it. The sledding stopped this day, no one knew what branch would crash to the ground next and it was too dangerous to take the chance.

Today, we are cleaning up. There is still snow on the ground, though now the rain has begun. We have over a foot and a half of snow still on the ground. The limbs are still falling as the rain is making the snow even heavier and the trees can't bear the weight. Next will be flooding, the water has to go somewhere and nature will have her way. The beauty has gone from the snow. It will take weeks to repair what Mother Nature did in just a few days and still continues to do. She is a force to be deal with, more powerful than anything that man can conceive of.