THE STORM

Thursday night, May 3 into Friday morning, May 4, there was a MASSIVE storm that passed through Germantown Hills where my mom and dad live. Mary and I were in bed in her room and Charlotte was next door in the guest bedroom. She ended up waking up at some point during the storm so I put her in bed with me. I had forgotten how severe storms in the Midwest are. The storms on the coast or in Charleston just aren't bad. In fact, I usually sleep right through them. 

So this storm was bad. LOUD LOUD thunder. BRIGHT lightening. POURING DOWN RAIN. Naturally my dad slept right through it but Mary and I were tossing and turn. Around 1 am we here this LOUD crack of thunder and I look toward the window and I see a flash of light and sparks flying and a crazy loud CRACK. Well, when I was like 8 yrs old, our next door neighbor's tree caught on fire from lightning and I was the one who found it. So I was FREAKED out that the tree was on fire. Mary and I knew the massive walnut tree right outside of our window had been hit and we were afraid that it was on fire (we checked to make sure it wasn't) and we were afraid it was going to fall on the house.  So we picked up Goose and took her to the spare bedroom. When we got up the next morning, this is what we found outside...

The bark from the tree was EVERYWHERE.

The lightning strike was 3 stories up but it traveled all of the way down the tree and into the ground.

See where the bark is missing???

Dad's hostas (sp?) took quite a beating. 

Even though we never lost power, the cable, phone, and internet were ALL jacked up. We had to get a new cable box and one of the HD components on the tv was ruined by the lightning. We were lucky that was all that was damaged.

Crazy storm.