Debris

 It's always nice to have a word in French to describe something that is even the slightest bit vulgar or depressing. Detente, Tripes de poisson. And the aforementioned Debris. I went out for my Saturday morning run and observed firsthand the wreckage that had occurred the night before in and around our neighborhood after an overnight windstorm. Vegetation took the brunt of the damage. Limbs scattered the sidewalks and streets, and on at least a couple of occasions I had to dodge around entire trees that had become uprooted or snapped in the prevailing fifty to seventy mile an hour winds. There were also a number of fences that did not fare well as they attempted in vain to hold back the breeze. When the sun came up, folks were out in front of their homes doing triage. See what I did there?

This included the gate in front of my own house, which did not fail, but acquired an unsteady lean that made for a morning's work repairing and rejiggering the damage. Another French word: Damage. As I busied myself with the task that has been central to my experience as a homeowner, I listened to the chainsaws buzzing away just half a block away where an old oak had tumbled over, lifting an entire section of concrete driveway into the air before collapsing on the neighbor's fancy new fence. I felt relieved to be dealing with just one portion of the catastrophe. Another word we borrowed from the French: catastrophe.

While I dealt with the wreckage, texts were coming in from friends and coworkers, describing their challenges with the way the weather treated them and their property. One of my colleagues sent a photo of the entire top of a twenty foot tree that fell off onto the street, narrowly missing her car, leaving a snag of a trunk standing in front of their house. It would no longer be a place to climb or a spot for a tire swing. This was now destined to be a home improvement project that would probably involve heavy equipment.

And somewhere in the midst of all this chaos, I found myself being thankful. Not just for the relatively slight inconvenience I was left to deal with, but because the winds were relatively tame compared to those that swept through the subdivisions up the road from my childhood home.

And there was no fire driven by those gales. In the days to come, I am sure there will be stories of families displaced by this storm. But the order of the day was repairing, not rebuilding. Folks who were without power had their lives temporarily inconvenienced by a downed power line, but they were not forced to evacuate. We went back to our lives.

With joie devivre and esprit de corps.