We knew an ice storm was coming toward us but did not think it would be bad. Our pantry was stocked. At first, the storm was a regular sleet/ice storm. We spent the early part of the evening watching an episode from the old miniseries, The Winds of War. Since our home business is in the basement, we’d be okay.
First the ice was simply clicking on the ceiling.
Our power flickered. Always game for a joke, I made up a song, “Hold up the Power Lines,” to the tune of the old hymn, “Throw Out the Lifeline.
I dozed as the storm continued. Richard was restless, and I could hear him continually getting up. Around 11, I woke as we started hearing crashes. Tree limbs, overburdened with ice, began to crackle and crash. They didn’t sound heavy. We have two hundred-year-old maple trees in our front yard, one in back, and a 150 year old oak tree as well. Richard watched which limbs fell where.
I grew nervous. For awhile, I watched TV so I wouldn’t hear the crashes. We turned the thermostat up to 72 in case we lost power. The crashes hit more often, about once every 5 minutes. We felt a few thud to the ground. It started to get scary.
I went online to distract myself and saw that one of my daughter’s friends had posted that she was getting scared of trees falling in the ice storm. I posted a message to her to remember that we were told, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of time.” A friend in Sweden posted she was getting worried about people in our area. I posted that the crashes were now happening every minute. Then I turned off the computer, in case we lost power.
Nick, our almost-thirteen-year-old, got up and told us we needed to sleep in the basement. He said trees could land on the house. He moved to the basement. I didn’t know what to do and asked our guardian angels to direct us. Elizabeth, our fourteen-year-old, told us she would be fine and went back to bed. The crashes grew louder. Our front yard was filled with debris.
I asked all the saints and angels to pray that our home, garage, and cars would be spared from disaster. Crash went another branch, and I added a prayer asking that our trees would also spare our neighbor’s home and car. With a pound, a branch landed up front — we saw it should have hit our neighbor’s car, but somehow stayed at the last moment.
“Elizabeth, shouldn’t you go downstairs?”
“I’ll be fine.”
I prayed for her guardian angel to pull her out of that room if there were danger. At first, she dozed. Then she got up and told us, “I’ve got to go downstairs.”
Richard and I patrolled the windows, watching which limbs fell where. Sometimes, the kids came up to check with us. I grabbed a rosary and began praying as I walked. For two hours, at least one branch per minute fell somewhere on our block. We could see and hear them throughout the neighborhood. The icy snow reflected like glass as each branch shattered on the ground.
Across the city skyline, we saw flares of transformers going out. We had power until around 2:30 am. Our area’s transformer blew with a flash of green, then blue, and finally red in the sky. The limbs still crashed. I went from window to window, praying for our family and home. I implored the angels to hold up our trees and save our homes.
A swath of tree debris covered our driveway between our cars and the road. All the trees on our block were crashing, the roads were covered with ice, and we couldn’t get out even if we wanted to escape the falling branches.
Our house shook as part of a tree hit our roof around 3:30 am. Immediately, Richard went outside to survey the damage. Elizabeth and I watched him from the kitchen window. As he stood in the pelting, icy rain, we could easily see him in the snow as the sky filled with the sparks of more transformers blowing. I prayed a host of angels upon him and a shield of protection to keep him safe. Branches fell in front, behind, and to his sides while he was out there. When he returned, he told us it was on the roof. “I heard breaking glass and can’t see what caused it.”
None of the rest of us heard the breaking glass. When the power went out, we had a new problem. Our basement sump pump has a short battery backup. But there was a pounding rain outside, and we were getting some water, despite the cold January temperatures. Richard and Nick grabbed flashlights to begin bailing in the dark. It was a manageable water flow if they kept up with it; they filled an ice cream bucket full of water every 30 minutes. Because of flash floods and the rain, our sewer backup valve was up to prevent backup overflow. There was nowhere for the water to go unless we bailed.
We struggled with what to do with the sump water. With no power, we had no furnace. Each time we opened the door, we would lose heat. So we decided to dump the sump water down the kitchen sink, which was draining into the sewers. It took two people to scoop the sump water, so Richard, Elizabeth, and Nick opted to take shifts. Without heat, the basement rapidly cooled, and the utility room where the sump hole is already is our coldest room.
I still prayed rosaries nonstop and grabbed a bottle of holy water near that kitchen sink. The branches still crashed outside. I walked from room to room, sprinkling holy water. Elizabeth stared at me and asked if holy water with rosaries was a little extreme. I kept sprinkling and praying, from room, to room, praying a hedge of protection. Sometimes, the crashes distracted me such that I forgot a prayer and instead just said, “Lord, I can’t remember what comes next so please fill in the gaps.” As I helped warm up whoever was off shift from dumping, I kept losing rosaries and having to find new ones. As I walked through the house, I closed off bedrooms with windows to help keep our heat in the living room. Many times, I got distracted and lost my rosary. So I grabbed another from our collection and continued praying.
The freezing rain began to slow and was replaced by snow. By 5, fewer crashes were happening, and it took longer between sump runs. Richard and Nick said they could handle it. Elizabeth sat with me in the living room as I continued my rosaries, sprinkled with Divine Mercy chaplets. She prayed with me.
By 6, the crashes had nearly stopped, as had the need for constant sump runs. Finally, I concluded my prayers by saying, “All the saints and angels, please keep praying for us and our safety and our trees ’cause I’m just too tired to pray any longer.” It had been 4 hours since the rosaries began. We all collapsed and dozed in our living room until about 7, when a friend called to check on us.
We could survey our damage in the daylight. Our front yard and driveway were covered with tree limbs, 5 feet deep, throughout the entire yard. Our cars, our neighbor’s house and car, and the front of our house were safe. We could see the limbs on the roof, but they did not look that bad.
The kids went to their bedrooms to get ready for a day of storm cleanup. When Elizabeth opened her bedroom door, she screamed, “There’s a tree in my room!” When I went into her bedroom, a single branch stuck through her ceiling, looking like a javeline thrown from the sky. It extended about 6 inches through the ceiling, directly over Elizabeth’s bed. The limb had penetrated the ice, the roof, the decking, the attic, and her bedroom ceiling. Her bedding was covered with debris and insulation from the ceiling. We believe it was from the crash 30 minutes after Elizabeth left her room for the basement. I did not want to think what could have happened had she stayed in her room.
With trees on the roof and a branch in the ceiling, our night of the broken branches was now an insurance claim. For the next hour, I sat on the phone with our insurance company and then looking for a tree trimmer. After I started the claim and found a trimmer, I relaxed enough to focus on breakfast. While I worked on those details, Richard and the kids carried the tree limbs from our driveway.
We had peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast. I have a nervous stomach and sometimes when the going gets tough, my stomach gets going. This was one of those times. Two minutes after I finished eating, I was sick. With that, I realized I had flunked the Caroline Ingalls Cool in Disasters for My Children Role Model Paradigm. I had slept two hours at most, was startled every time a new branch fell, and was queasy. But we were the grownups.
So I asked the Lord to guide me and my guardian angel to help me.
It was a long, hard day. The tree trimmer reached our house at 10:30 and left a quote with us. Richard and two other neighbors spent two hours getting one neighbor’s truck out of his driveway and onto the road. One end of our street was closed with three collapsed trees. There was only one way in or out. Our landline phone worked, but the line itself rested in our driveway.
For lunch, we resorted to bologna and cheese sandwiches and chips. Word from other friends trickled in slowly. As we listened to a battery radio, we learned that half the people in our city had no power, shelters were opened, and there were transport pickup points for the shelters.
We divided our tasks. I worked to keep heat in the house, decorating in a nomadic refugee motif, with towels and blankets on windows and under doors. Elizabeth’s task was to put up blankets on towel rods on our living room doorways to keep heat in the room. Our house which started the outage at 72 was slowly growing cooler. By mid-afternoon, it was 68 degrees. I went on a scavenger hunt to scrounge candles and flashlights. Two years ago, I had bought a box of tapers for my 4-H club which were never used, and I had only discovered them in our closet last week; my guardian angel was even caring for us then. It’s a challenge to find things by flashlight, and I couldn’t find candle holders. So I pulled down Richard’s great-grandfather’s crucifix, which held two candles and a holy water font. We put the tapers in it for light. I also re-arranged furniture to fit our fold-out beds and furniture for a campout. Elizabeth helped me collect every blanket, comforter, and sleeping bag in our home to prepare for our evening campout.
As we made our arrangements, I spoke with friends. Six friends invited us to share their homes that had electricity, but we opted to stay at home as we didn’t think we could get out of our driveway. Neighbors and friends brought us thermoses with hot coffee, hot water, hot chocolate, and brownies.
Nick helped Richard clean snow off our cars and then tackled the tree limb in the ceiling. They climbed into the attic, pulled the limb out of the ceiling, pushed it back through the roof, and then made a temporary patch with extra shingles and wood scraps. They pulled a camp stove out of garage storage to put it together.
I had never before cooked on a camp stove. The week before, I had bought a giant can of ravioli on sale at the store. We eat simple foods, and I buy a can of that stuff maybe once every five years. It became our dinner feast and the first meal I ever cooked on a camp stove.
For dinner, we ate ravioli and brownies by candlelight in the living room. Since we missed our regular Bible story at breakfast, we read it at dinner. It was Mark’s story of Jesus with the loaves and the fish.
Jesus gave the crowd who followed Him the food they had needed. He had given us what we needed to get through an impossible day. Both kids had helped us meet nearly impossible tasks. They hadn’t acted like kids but like young adults — the kind you would want on your team in a crisis. As we got ready for bed, I discovered all the missing rosaries of the storm. Each was in a different pocket of a different layer of clothing. During that storm, I had temporarily misplaced 6 different rosaries in different pockets at different times.
As the evening’s darkness crept in, bringing cooler air with it, we had a movie night. We watched the movie by candlelight, on laptops, covered in blankets. Since it was challenging to cook, we ate cheese slices on crackers as a movie snack.
We debated experimenting with a never-opened kerosene heater for the evening and decided the room was warm enough without it. Our strategy succeeded in keeping the room warm. While we watched the movie, our exhaustion crept in with slowly cooling air. The kids fell asleep when the movie ended.
Richard and I finished our night and day of the broken branches holding hands in our living room looking at our kids by candle-light, with a two foot high stack of extra blankets and covers in the corner, ready for whomever might need them. Our nightmare had become a dream of a family working together as a team.
Our kitten played on the floor around us. With each thump he made, we startled as it reminded us of the branches breaking. To help the kids sleep and relax, I started a rosary. Richard joined me, and we finished our night and day of the broken branches the way I started it — praying for our family.
And that made all the difference.
