Studio Time

I seriously considered changing the name of “Self Evisceration” to the above title. That is what most of this last week or so has been.

We had a tornado wander down the alley behind our house the other day. That marks the second time in my life I’ve been scared shitless by the weather. The first was a few years back when lightning hit the porch I was standing on in the middle of a thunderstorm. Usually, I love thunderstorms. I frequently go outside to watch them. Watching the world explode around you is like turning the thrill knob up to eleven though.

This last time; my son and I were standing near the door that leads to our deck watching the back yard and discussing whether it might be a good idea to go downstairs and actually pay attention to the tornado warnings that kept popping up on our phones. The kids were already downstairs but my son had come back up to try to convince me it wasn’t safe. True to form, I sort of discounted the idea. Being much wiser than I, my son started to walk back downstairs anyway. As he did, I turned back to the window, just in time to see half of the trees in our yard simply… disappear. I followed fairly quickly. If the wind had come fifty feet closer to the house I doubt that I’d be writing this today.

I’ve spent the better part of the past several days out back, with a chainsaw, trying to uncover what used to be our yard. The picture above is a pretty good representation of what the entire yard looked like last week. There’s a Japanese maple in the cage there… It’s 4 feet tall. The cage is 3 feet tall… just for scale. It was meant to protect the little tree from rabbits.