Wind-in-the-Pines

Wind-in-the-Pines is my fanciful, poetic name for the forest home I love so much.  I love to hear the soft sighing whisper of the wind caressing the pine needles.  And we have lots of pines, as you can see in this misty-morning shot in September of our first year here:

More than once, though, the wind blowing through the pines has not been such a good thing.  On June 26, 2010 a very powerful wind storm tore through this little corner of south-eastern Manitoba and damaged several properties in its path.  Our property was directly in its path and, in about ten minutes of roaring wind and rain, we lost over one-third of the forest that sheltered our home.

Thanks to God's grace we sustained very little damage to our house (although the shingles took a real beating and needed to be replaced) and no cars or sheds were hit.  Our daughter was not home, a very good thing as it turned out, as two huge poplars fell right where her little car would have been parked.  We had no power for 28 hours; falling trees had taken out the power along our road and it took Manitoba Hydro some time to get to us and remove trees and debris to repair the line, which had snapped in several places.

I called our our kids for help and, bless their hearts, they responded bright and early the next morning.  Our sons worked to cut up and move three huge trees that blocked the driveway and the turn-around while Garry and I continued surveying the damage.  We soon realized that we would  need professional help; even  our sons' and daughter-in-law's hours of hard at work made barely a dent in the clean-up that was needed.  So, for the rest of that summer, and for much of the fall and following spring, this is what we saw and heard in our yard:

I've been meaning to blog this event but somehow could never bring myself to revisit the feelings that came with it.  Then, just last weekend, while we were in Saskatoon, guess what happened ... again?  Fortunately, it wasn't nearly as bad this time but it was just enough to bring all those feelings and thoughts of two years ago back to me.  Here's what we saw when we got up on our first morning home:

We lost seven trees to the wind this time; it's starting to feel like soon there won't be many pines to define our forest home anymore.  We've planted a few hundred seedlings by now, over the last couple of years since the first storm, and they all seem to be doing well ... but seedlings don't turn into full-grown pines overnight.  The power of Nature is changing our landscape and redefining our home.