We came home on Sunday to some debris, but no significant damage. Certain Man cleaned up some, but said that the girls could help him on Monday morning. The deck had quite abit of loose stuff on it. And the gutters had filled up and overflowed.
Our Hybrid Thornless Honey Locust trees are especially apt to shed their branches
I had taken my flowers off the deck rail and put them on the table, so they had survived pretty well. These branches were partly from the storm and partly what had to be cut out.
Things didn’t look quite so bad on the other side of the deck.
I came out of the side door onto the deck and heard something far over head:
If you look really, really closely, you will see a head up there near the peak of the roof. That’s middle Daughter, manning a pruning tool, trying to cut off some troublesome limbs. I couldn’t look at her up there without a tingling in my legs. It looked so precarious. But she is old enough to be her own boss, so I tried to refrain from ordering her down “this instant!”
Down on the next level, there were gutters to clean. According to the slave labor, the debris in the gutters
smelled like “cow diarrhea” (ew-w-w-w!!!)
It was hard, hard work, and the ledge was precarious, causing the Mama to make much noise about being careful!!! It was great fun to make believe that maybe you were going to fall.
Certain Man has never been one to make his children do something that he isn’t willing to do, too.
The day will come when our children look back and remember a Dad who put his shoulder to the wheel no matter what the job and stayed with it until it was finished. I can honestly say that there has never been a time when he took it easy while the kids worked. He didn’t always work at the very same job, but if they were doing a job, he was working, too, somewhere. Here he takes his turn at a dirty, smelly job.
Part of the time, he had the long pruning hook and was cutting back some limbs that were scraping the roof. It had made a terrible noise during the storm the other night, and the racket convinced him that it needed to be done.
Youngest Daughter has been our chicken house helper for a few years now, and she can handle the tractor quite well. Here she extends the loader so that all that stinky stuff from the buckets can be brought to the ground and dumped into the burn pit.
Back on the ground again (while Mama draws a sigh of relief), Middle Daughter
cleans the buckets so that they can be put away.
Later last night, our Nettie-girl came home from visiting her sister and swept the remaining leaves off the deck. It has been raining off and on, so it was hard to get a picture of it in this weather. So, these will have to do!
This was taken after todays rain.
And this was, too.
I’m so thankful that our home was spared the brunt of storm.
And my heart and prayers go out to the many people who are still without power or telephone.
According to the paper, there are quite a number.
Delaware Grammy 