Swanton Storms

The tornado warnings of friday night were incredibly frightening for me. As I explain in one of the stories in The Horses We Love, The Lessons We Learn, my family suffered a direct hit from a rather large tornado when I was quite young. The fear of that experience has stayed with me.

I have a routine. The sirens go off, I quickly gather all the animals in the house, my favorite blanket, a flashlight and my cell phone and sit on the bathroom floor. This has been my routine since we built this house 18 years ago. However, we have recently replaced the large sturdy tub with a standing glass shower. Now I am surrounded by glass and I am sure it isn't as safe as it once was. It is familiar to me so there is safety in familiarity regardless of how dumb it might be. So here is the thing. A new client was supposed to bring his dog at 3:00 in the afternoon. We close at 4:00 on friday but I waited. He was three doors down all day and never bothered to call to say he would be late. 6:00 rolls around and still no word. So I called a client on the waiting list and rented his run to them. Cut to 8:30 pm on a firday night and the tornado sirens are blaring and I am sitting in my safe place and my cell phone rings. Now he is telling me that he is a little late but would like to come now. I explain that is not an option and ask if he sees the funnel cloud in the field across the street that my hubby is describing to me. He says no. I say good bye and hang up the phone and he continued to call me back four times! I finally turned off the phone.

I am willing to go the extra mile for a client however this was about 20 miles and it had been a long week. I told him he could come in the morning at 8:30 when we opened and we would make some changes to accomodate him. He was a no show.

So after the friday night storms, I mowed the grass and finished yard work thinking that more rain was coming and the lawn would look wonderful for the entire week. Wrong! More storms blew through last night and mother nature decided that the large maple tree would look lovely on my fence, our big cherry would be better on the neighbors fence and our sassafras tree fit perfectly across our driveway. Trees take up less space when they are standing upright, don't they? So the view from the back of my horse (and the neighbors horses who were enjoying the leaves off the downed tree) is whomever invented the chainsaw because ours is going to be used a lot over the next few days. Oh happy days. I hope everyone survived the storms.

Blessings
Tena