Quite the little freshet blew in this afternoon. Along about 2 p.m., it got as dark as evening — you’d have thought it was 7 or 8 o’clock at night. Then a heckuva rain and windstorm hit.
Shortly, my neighbor Will e-mailed to report damage in his part of the ’hood: branches on a roof, gate down… Naturally, after the sun came out the dogs and I had to go out to explore, along with all the other neighbors.
Across the road, my neighbors’ young paloverde tree looked like some cosmic hand had reached down out of the sky and smashed it from above. It lost one limb during the last storm, but this one flattened the thing.
On my old street, two blocks to the north, an Aleppo pine, uprooted, crashed to the ground. Fortunately, it fell into the street and not onto the neighbor’s house.
These pine trees, a popular landscaping item forty years ago when our houses were built, grow fast, get huge, and are brittle. If they’re not kept pruned so the wind can blow through, limbs will break off and fall on nearby structures. Or the whole damn thing can fall over.
Back in the Pleistocene, when I was a young society matron, one of our social acquaintances lived in a historic house in a district of old mansions. It was shaded by a historic Aleppo. Come a monsoon one summer, a limb the size of a small tree snapped off the thing and fell on their four-year-old’s bedroom. Luckily, the child wasn’t in the room — if he had been, he would have been seriously injured or killed. Like eucalyptus and cottonwood, it’s not a tree one would like to park next to one’s home.
Amazingly, none of the trees in the forest that surrounds the Funny Farm broke, not even the remaining devil pod tree on the west side. Those things — known in the real world as willow acacia — are also fast-growing, messy, and brittle. The Aleppo is one of the few trees that makes a bigger, even more obnoxious mess than the devil pod.
Guess I need to have that taken out, now that the weather’s cooling. It could be replaced, I think with a desert willow, which is quite a pretty tree and, while not as tall, provides nice shade when it’s mature. And doesn’t fall over in a stiff breeze.
At any rate, these melodramatic storms are coming more often and more violently, presumably thanks to climate change. Probably would be a good idea to remove — or at least tend to — the brittle and the breakable. Make an insurance company happy!