This is determination

Sunday night, after about 3 hours of helping remove trees from our street, we sat at Culvers. The three Schultes. Our eyes reflected our lingering shock and exhaustion. Our lack of conversation revealed how totally starving we were after the stress and manual labor. That's when Rosie interrupted the silence with, "It's our first tornado as a family, mom."

"Let's hope it is our last." I said as I smiled a little.

I haven't been shy about talking about this. It's all but consumed my thoughts the past few days. Our neighborhood is considered "The Disaster Zone" but we got away lucky. There are homes only one block away missing their entire second story, their roofs, the back walls. So I realize our damage really isn't a lot to whine about. Particularly compared to the losses in Joplin, but it was certainly the most scary thing I've experienced. So here's my little dedication to our family's tornado experience together.

Here's another photo of Rosie helping cut branches of trees away.

 

Here's our backyard, which is rather unscathed except the vinyl fence.

And one of the foreclosed homes, which unfortunately means it will likely  have a tree in front of it for some time.

The news coverage was kind of disappointing the hours and days after the storm. Everything I read online (because we lacked power to get the news) focused on looting, which was actually pretty limited, or the curfew, which also only lasted one night.

Yet, the story on our block was the 30-plus neighbors who came out with chainsaws, saws and just by themselves to help clear the trees from the street and off of cars.

It's amazing how so many people can clear three trees in one short afternoon. In a way, the labor helped us distract ourselves from the thoughts of "what if."

The damage to the car from the tree.

Our doorway covered in trees.

The house from the street. 

Thankfully, the curfew only lasted one night because police helicopters circled our neighborhood the entire night while it was in effect--waking us up regularly.

The best news was that no one was hurt in our family, but even cooler news was that the city removed the tree for free because it was from the boulevard, which is technically city property.

It's removal was kind of exciting in a warped way. An interesting reveal of what lay beneath the beautiful maple tree.

And then it wasn't so exciting...

So now we all sit waiting for the insurance company to finally send an assessor out so our contractor can begin legitimate repair. And Rosie has handled the entire thing really well. She had one understandable vent session Wednesday night, "Mom, I hate it here...the traffic is slow, especially during rush hour, and they're slow to fix the power and clean the trees out of the streets." can we move to the country where things are faster?"

I empathized with her and promised the storm damage would be cleaned up soon. I always thought of the country as being slower paced, but leave it to Rosie to make me think of things differently.