It was around 3 o'clock in the morning of Saturday, August 11th, that we woke to the roar of a locomotive heading directly into our bedroom at full speed.  It was accompanied by deafening cracks of thunder and steady bolts of lightning that lit up our bedroom as though it were high noon.  And still we bumped into each other as we were jolted awake and didn't know just which way to scramble first.  Rain was pouring down in torrents and slamming things against our windows.   As we ran from room to room, upstairs and down, turning on lights, shutting off lights, we could see shadows of disaster in our beautiful yard as lightning lit up patches of the pitch black night.  Then we could only sit back and wait until finally dawn of day would fully reveal the destruction all around us.

From our upstairs bedroom windows, we saw a tangled mass of green and broken bough that covered our entire backyard.

From another window, the fallen trees looked like green shrubs that had sprouted from our lawn.

The felled trees and tree tops invaded our deck.

Fallen trees were everywhere.

Trees tops decorated what had been clean and manicured areas of landscape.

We viewed the destruction from other windows.

Clean white bark had been stripped from top to bottom as mature and stately maple trees lost their heads in the storm.

The worst was most evident from all sides of our many-windowed porch.

You couldn't tell there was even a lawn in our backyard.

Trees from on high rested their heads and limbs on our deck.  High winds put an unwanted tilt into the table umbrella of our outdoor furniture.

Smooth edges of our decking were gouged by falling timbers.

Our house and outdoor things were plastered with dirt and debris blown at us with the high winds of the storm.

Trees seemed to be growing where they were never planted.

Our back yard seemed like an overgrown terrarium that had been dumped upside down … yet almost all of my potted plants remained perfectly intact.

Kind of a rusty view of things.

Looks green and lush because the treetops on our deck are still green.

The once magnificent tree that shaded our front door and newly landscaped entry was a gonner from top to bottom.

Twin maples nearby had also been snapped in the storm.  It seems lightning does the ripping and wind does the snapping.

A view from the bottom of our driveway.

See how the pots remained untouched.

Some light fixtures were twisted around and upside down.

The storm slapped crud onto everything..

The peak of the roof was caved by the tree trunk as it fell at least a dozen feet before landing.