We thought we escaped unscathed from the severe storms of May, until our lawn guy corrected this misconception. We have a very deep, half-acre lot, and the back of the lot is a tangle of brush, shrubs, and trees. The planty chaos didn’t look any different when we observed it from our civilized fenced area, but lawnmower man informed us that we had lost a sizeable tree. The felled wood combined with a tree lost in the winter to make the back of our lot inaccessible. So no real damage, but some inconvenience.
Last Sunday afternoon I was enjoying the calmer rain brought by June. I had just put both boys down for naps, and I was reading a magazine while listening to the gentle thunder of the summer storm. Suddenly — CRACK! Uh-oh. I knew that sound from when the maples at my childhood home succumbed to ice storms. Yep, we lost another tree.
This tree, instead of falling harmlessly on the back of our property, decided to take out part of our fence and position itself over my son’s swingset. Not good, tree, not good.
To add to the fun, this was a weekend when Paul was in Texas for family and business, and he wouldn’t get back until late Monday night.
My parents came over to the house on Sunday night and helped me patch up the fence with a screen and lumber to make sure the dog wouldn’t get out. I called the fence guy to come out and give me an estimate for repairing the fence. Paul started making tentative plans to find a chainsaw and some guys to help him move the tree after he got home.
Then a great blessing fell into our laps. Alan Murdock, relief coordinator extraordinaire, posted on our neighborhood listserv that some volunteers were in town to help people with storm cleanup. Their planned cleanup site already had enough help, so they needed a new place to work. I let Alan know that we could use some help.
Monday afternoon, a cleanup crew got to work on our yard. They cut up the tree that had crashed through the fence, stacked the wood neatly in our yard, straightened the fence, and proceeded to clean up the fallen trees in the back of our yard as well.
The volunteers were so kind and helpful, working hard despite the 90-degree heat (and despite the fact that they were Red Wings fans). Without their help, we would have taken weeks if not months to accomplish all of those tasks. Now we probably won’t even need to have the fence repaired. During what is already a crazy month, the help from the volunteers was an amazing blessing that took a lot of stress out of our lives.
Have you been gifted with help from a stranger this week?
