For Wilshire Baptist Church
City trucks have been crawling through our Embree neighborhood the past few days, slowly gathering the remains of shattered trees in the wake of last Tuesday’s storm. It’s slow, tedious work that blocks the streets and fills the air with the groans of motors and the beep-beeps of backup alarms, but it’s help we need and want so we welcome the noise and interruptions.
I mentioned the storm last week in this space and was ready to move on, but the continued rain and wind this week brought down more limbs and kept many people in the dark. At our house, we lost power for just a few hours, but our internet and cable services were out for several days and have been unreliable more than a week later. The continued rain has delayed the repair of siding pulled loose by the storm, and kept me from mowing with standing water and mud in the yard.
We didn’t have much tree debris to pile up after the storm, but a large elm tree at the vacant house next door was split with large limbs dangling and resting on both that property and ours. After a call to the owner brought no action, I grabbed my pole saw and brought down limbs hanging by nothing more than strips of bark and dragged them to the curb. I was trying to be helpful, but my motive was somewhat self-serving: when the same tree split during a previous storm, dangling limbs lay for weeks on the corner of our lawn and killed the grass underneath.
Back in 1886 when the neighborhood was the heart of the town of Embree, such work was no doubt handled by men with mule-drawn wagons. The limbs and trunks were probably cut up for firewood to cook and warm homes in the winter. Today we have no use for the wood, so we have to wait for trucks to carry it away.
That’s the story on the physical cleanup. The emotional cleanup came on Saturday evening when our friend, neighbor and city council representative hosted a BBQ dinner at a community golf course to announce her campaign for mayor. There were lots of community folks there we don’t know, but there also were enough of us from Embree to fill a table. The result was an impromptu check-in with folks we’d seen from a distance in recent days – often out helping each other clean up.
Everyone at the table was in an upbeat mood and just glad to still have their homes and families after tornadoes hit the community of Valley View a few days before our storm. And everyone was glad to see each other and catch up on more regular news such as summer vacation plans, health concerns and new restaurants on the downtown square.
After dinner, a few of us walked out on a broad outdoor plaza shaded by some of the largest oak and pecan trees I’ve ever walked beneath. I felt a little uneasy at first, wondering aloud if it was safe considering the tree damage in our neighborhood. But there were children running and playing tag in the shade of the trees, so I put away my adult worries and enjoyed the moment.
A little ways in the distance, I could see a creek running fast enough to carry a canoe downstream without paddling. I also noticed how the golf course had cleaned up their fallen trees and had things looking nice. That brought hope we could do the same back in Embree – and in your neighborhood too.