Well, I feel that it’s going to be a lot of work to get everything back together again... There’s no sense getting upset about this, because it’s already happened.”

Christine Creswell

Sunday evening, retired teacher Christine Creswell was looking out onto her back deck “because it was raining and the wind was just blowing like crazy and the hail was coming down,” when she heard a large pine tree felled by the wind come thundering onto the roof of her house. “It was like a groan and then kind of a crash.”

Creswell went to see what it was “and there was the tree in my living room and in my bedroom. Fortunately I was not in the bedroom or the living room,” she chuckled in relief.

Her first thoughts upon seeing the scene were “Oh my goodness, I should have had that tree taken down before,” words spoken through laughter, indicating perhaps a tinge of regret or simply an acknowledgment of the absurd reality of the situation that the elements and an evergreen had engaged her home in arboreal warfare.

Walking up to her front door, along the path perpendicular to the horizontal pine, the strong scent of the recently toppled tree was evident. The bark and needles’ odor was more powerful than any air-freshener, closer to a whole forest than a single sap-filled fir.

On whether she felt grateful, “Oh, yes!” Creswell exclaimed, “This could be so much worse; the Lord protected me; I wasn’t in there.”

The next morning, a crew led by a former middle school English student, Mark Anderson, worked to dismantle the tree and assess the damage. Inside, Creswell expressed gratitude that the destruction hadn’t occurred at night or the wood could have come down right on her head in her bed. Though a limb pierced into her living room, it didn’t damage the upright piano just feet away, a happy note.

She’s lived in the house since July 1988 and the massive pine was already established “and that big whenever I came, so it is an old, old tree.” The rings inside the conifer’s trunk indicate at least six decades of growth, and its height extended beyond the length of the house, more than 50 feet.

After a long, reflective gaze at her house with the decades-old pine lodged in it, Creswell shared, “Well, I feel that it’s going to be a lot of work to get everything back together again,” as she let out a quiet sigh, a sentiment likely shared by many.

After expressing gratitude for her well-being, Creswell declared, “There’s no sense getting upset about this, because it’s already happened,” successfully collecting her stoic composure.

“We’ll go on from here.”

And so will we all.