We went upstairs and the first thing my wife, Rachel, noticed was that there seemed to be more sky visible through the woods than before, more sun coming through them. Too much sky. Too much sun. And the dogwood trees, just adjacent to the pond -in-development were visible. That was just plain wrong! They should be obscured, behind the red maple. The red maple. Where was the beautiful red maple that we had envisioned as anchoring the eastern end of our future pond?

We walked out further and saw it lying morgue-like on the ground. Its body had been broken into pieces, starting two feet up from the ground. The wind had snapped it in two and it lay on the ground, oozing sap, life draining from its mangled trunk and torn, shredded limbs and branches, it's top third broken off and cradled in the slouching arms of the adjacent cedar.

It was uncanny, unnatural, unspeakable, the power of the wind and the rain and the cross-currents of air that laid waste to all greenery that surrounded us. But we hadn't seen the half of it. We were some of the lucky ones.  The radio would soon tell us how lucky.  Its voices would become our eyes to the disaster that had just visited us.