Friday the 13th Catastrophe

Last night my mother was forced to set fire to at least four hundred decorative candles, that had previously had no obligation to the world other than looking fancy and smelling pretty.

There were lit decorative candles in bunches in the living room, around and about the dining room and kitchen, on the tops of the toilets, on the work bench, adjacent to the propane-fuelled grill which was rolled into the garage from the rain and lit, much like a candle, except its purpose was not light, but great and intense heat, which was used to cook bits of meats and potatoes and asparagi, which is the plural of asparagus, which would otherwise have to be asparaguses, or asparagus.

Water, thankfully, was plentiful in the outdoor setting, if not the indoor setting. And so buckets were used to collect the plentiful waters from the roof downspouts, and these buckets of water were poured into toilet tanks, and verily, we could pee and then flush, too.

This romantically candlelit family reunion was happening in order to introduce my newest nephew to the ancient lands of my family, which were wrecked yesterday by a storm that came through and poured hundreds and hundreds of pounds of water, in semisolid forms, onto still-fully-leafed tree branches, which had not been exercising and were feeling puny, and did not have it in them to resist snapping and falling ruined to the ground after a short, inferred struggle.

And so, verily, great swaths of the ancient lands of my family have had a genocide of the trees, which are one of my top three favourite examples of biology upon the whole entire planet.

My father would describe how he was sleeping from Thursday night into Friday morning, and hearing trees outside, nearby and faraway, groaning, creaking, snapping, etc. He did not infer (but i did) that the only sound by morning was the sound of mother nature sobbing, which is not meeting the definition of melodramatic to mention, because it really happened, and it is a sad thing, because trees are worthwhile, especially when they are fully intact, and it is tragic when trees are not fully intact, and especially very old and dependable trees.

I drove down West Avenue on my way to my grandmother's guest bed at 10:30Pm, and it was like the apocalypse. It is true that the apocalypse will look very dark, power lines and broken tree branches will be halfway into the road, and lawns will be plastered with treecarnage.

Here are examples of the treecarnage.




The whole problem, we're guessing, is that the snowstorms are premature, and the presence of leaves on trees is overmature, and the mingling of these facts causes great devastation to ensue.

The deciduous trees have not been deciduous in a timely fashion, is what i mean. And this was baneful. I am not sure what chemical makes leaves become orange and brittle so that they fall off easily, but the trees should have been taking supplements of whatever that is, because their leaves totally caused them to become fucked over, and collect much more weight than they were ever rated for, and so they cracked off, and caused more damage on the way down, such as to thirty thousand electrical lines.

On Saturday morning we traveled to the house of some friends of the family, and we ate breakfast and drank coffee and watched the television, and the anchorpeople would discuss exactly the sorts of things you should be doing with your power out. On television, i said.

Anyways.