I woke up at 3:45 to the noise of the 150+ year old post oak that was the centerpiece of our backyard starting to fall down.
Matt woke up to me screaming as I realized what was happening.
In slow motion, with an enormous creaking noise, the whole tree snapped and fell, hitting mostly the laundry room on the corner of our house and our neighbor's two vehicles, with some other scattered damage in its wake.
It could have been so much worse. Last night we walked around the neighborhood and visited a house where a huge section of the second floor, including the bedroom, was totally obliterated by a tree less than half the size of ours. Miraculously the person who normally would have been sleeping in the now-flattened bed was on the first floor of her house, unable to sleep in the storm.
Still, we will miss this tree -- and all the critters who visited it and lived in it.
I found a couple of pictures we had of the tree in all its glory and tried to match them up with some pictures of the aftermath, but it's hard to convey even in pictures the magnitude of the destruction. (For a sense of scale, notice tiny me in the last picture.)
