Irene's Aftermath

All is well here post-Irene. The wind was pretty scary last night, and it did down some trees. We walked the neighborhood, but didn't see too much that was terribly wrong. We actually talked to *a lot* of people. It's funny how post-storm, everyone comes out to talk and check in. It's a nice feeling. Kind of like that camaraderie after a huge snowfall. But the nice thing is, the weather here was beautiful today!



We came home and cleaned up our yard a bit. Lucy was really into it:





Our yard was littered with various tree bits, and we discovered this afternoon, after a more thorough exploration, that we lost a large part of our lilac tree in the back/side yard. This is sad.

I'm not sure if the rest of the lilac will survive. Those beaten-down branches are actually still attached at the root, so I'm not sure how best to preserve what's left. The whole thing will be very off-balance without this half. Hrm. Need to do some lilac-pruning research here. Readers? Suggestions?



But we're very lucky all things told. Some folks here in Lowell still don't have power. Some of our not-too-distant neighbors up here on the hill are (we think) still without power as of Monday afternoon, due to a big tree that fell into a power transformer. Yikes! We drove by the work crews who were dealing with it:



We're told by a neighbor that the tree actually caught fire last night. Scary! (that's what's left of the tree on the left there -- sorry for the bad photo; I took it from the car)



That's all I have from the storm. I hope all are readers are fully powered and dry.



Also, today we checked out the Billerica Farmers' Market for the first time. It was awesome. We had an all-market dinner. Yum!