You might have heard that the northeast had some strong winds recently. This really isn’t unusual for us. We regularly get strong winds above 50 mph in the spring and the fall as fronts come through.
And unfortunately, because we are a heavily treed state, with large, mature evergreens, someone, somewhere will lose a tree–or two. You can see my neighbor’s woodpile in the photo behind what is soon to be more timber. He stacks his logs in between our upright pine trees.
As the above photo shows, one of our pines took a hit in these most recent winds. The top half came off, flew across the yard and landed on the roof with a thud so loud it woke me from a sound sleep (not an easy thing to do!) and shook the whole house.
Once it bounced off the roof, it slid down the side of the house, taking off the siding.
This is the “small” end of the tree. The larger part is in the top photo. I missed the “good part” yesterday where the branches were up to the second story windows.
And one of the sad things is that it shattered a lovely granite bench into several pieces, beyond repair.
But here I am, telling you all about it–so there’s nothing truly sad about this at all really. Because this could have been so much worse!
Gardendaze 
As awesome as the redwoods are, they do not belong in other regions where the weather is not as mild as it is here. They break from the weight of snow. (Snow is extremely rare here.) Ice storms like those in Texas would have brought down TONS of debris. I can not imagine what winds like those in the Northeast and Midwest would do. Most redwoods contain more lumber than the houses below them. They are so tall that they can crush a house hundreds of feet away. Debris falling from such heights is extremely dangerous. I wrote about some of the damage a while back. https://tonytomeo.com/2021/01/23/six-on-saturday-ill-wind/
The problem with these trees–all 267 of native white pine–is that the original owner of our home planted them as a border but didn’t maintain them as they were growing. So some have split leaders. And yes, most cannot support the weight of our ice and snow. I regularly write about the downed limbs after a heavy snow or ice storm.
We have been lucky that this doesn’t happen more often, honestly.
And in an ironic twist that I know you can appreciate, we had a small earthquake here yesterday. The epicenter was literally a quarter mile from my house. It sounded like a large “boom.” And yet, the house didn’t shake as much as when the tree fell on it.
Quite a week.
Karla