Before I touch on the hurricane, let me give a little back story. We had some coconut palm trees in our backyard. By some I mean 10. Yes, ten coconut palms that were too tall for us to reach the coconuts, so they ended up either drying up and falling all over the place or, every so often, Coconut Guy would come around our neighborhood offering to clean up the palm trees in exchange for the coconuts which he would sell. At first this was a win-win, and I was happy to let him come into the yard and get all the coconuts he wanted. He'd trim the trees, which was great because palm fronds are huge and difficult to dispose of. Since I don't have a truck I couldn't get them out to the dump, so I would have to cut them into pieces so I could put them in our trash can. Problem was, the trash can would get filled up with five palm fronds, meanwhile anywhere from 5-8 would fall down every week. It was hard to keep up with the mess in my yard. Whenever Coconut Guy came, he took care of that for me. Well, the first couple of times he did anyway.
Seems like Coconut Guy got tired of the extra work because the last few times he would get his coconuts and leave a mess of palm fronds all over my yard. I got tired of it and told him if he wanted coconuts he would have to take the trash with him as well. He agreed, took half of the branches, then didn't come back for months. So that was the end of that. Unfortunately, I still had these huge palm trees in my yard that quite frankly gave me cause for concern. Several of them were close to the house, and I feared any of them falling and destroying our roof. Cutting them down wasn't an option, though. It would cost upwards of $5,000 to have just one removed (did I mention we had 10?). So I prayed about it. I asked God to show me a way of getting the coconut palms out of my yard so they wouldn't cause me so much work, concern, and headaches.
Hurricane Irma started off in the Atlantic Ocean and intensified quickly. Between August 31 and September 5 it went from category 2 to category 5 status, hitting winds of over 180 mph. We watched as it decimated the island of Barbuda, then watched intently as it headed our way. Having lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992 I didn't want to experience another storm of that magnitude, but where would we go? People were leaving the state in droves, roadways were backed up for miles, and we who live here know how unpredictable hurricanes can be. What if we drove out of town only to have it meet us further north and in an unfamiliar area? We decided the best thing we could do was hunker down and pray. A lot.
For days we prepared and watched and listened. Finally, on September 8, we found out we were no longer in the cone. Hallelujah! Except that this was no tiny little storm, and being outside of the cone only meant we weren't getting a direct hit. South Florida got category 3 hurricane force winds, and that means extensive damage.
She reached us on September 10. She was actually below us, blowing through the Keys and then up the Gulf Coast. Inside, we sat in the darkness and listened as the winds howled. Since we had shutters on the windows we couldn't see what was going on outside, but through the sides we would catch a peak of the heavy rain. Then my daughter told me, "Mom, I think a tree fell on my window." You can well imagine the look of horror on my face! I asked what made her think that, and she said she was trying to get a peek through the sides of the shutters but all she could see was branches. We checked to see if there was any water coming into her bedroom, but all was dry. The storm was still coming through so we couldn't do anything else. Then she started looking through all the other windows, and it looked like another tree was down right next to the house. I was pretty sure it hadn't hit the house, otherwise we would have heard it, but it was close to our air conditioning unit. If it took that out, we'd be in big trouble. South Florida is hot, y'all. If the a/c unit was damaged, it would take weeks to get it fixed, and there's no way we could survive the heat. It made the next few hours even more tense.
By the time the storm had passed it was evening, and none of us wanted to go outside to see what was going on. Our neighbors came by to check on us, and they that informed us that we had not one, not two, but three trees come down in our backyard. Since it was late we decided to wait till the next day to go back and see. Our kind neighbors set us up with electricity from their generator so we could power some fans, but we didn't sleep that night. Between the heat and not entirely knowing what awaited us the next day, we probably all got less than three hours of sleep.
I shouldn't have worried. God showed up. He showed up in a big way.
The trees that fell behind the house somehow fell on the diagonal. One just barely missed the house, while the other was leaning on the edge of the roof. Our neighbor was able to cut it down with only a piece of one of the roof tiles having chipped. No other damage was done to the house.
The tree that had always worried me the most because it was closest to the house, fell right in between our house and our other neighbor's house. It missed our air conditioning unit and only took down a small section of the chain link fence. It was a miracle that a tree this size did so little damage.
Hurricane Irma taught me that God can answer prayers in the least expected circumstances. Behind the shed there was another tree that almost came down but it got caught in the tree next to it and was stuck there. But that's a story for another day.
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