So there I was, in the middle of the big wind of 1994, up the stairs and into the main part of the house I scrambled to try and find a radio.  With trees crashing down on each side of the house.  The house rocked in the wind.  Mature trees seemed to bend down to earth in the face of the mighty roaring wind.

I found a radio…of course with batteries that didn’t work, and grabbed a flashlight, and as luck would have it, just in time for the storm to subside and move off to the east, almost as quickly as it came.

The sight was one to behold after that mighty gust of wind hit that spring day in 1994.  Carefully carrying Mom upstairs, much more carefully now then when we carried her down, we went out to survey the damage.

It was shocking.  Branches of all sizes littered the yard.  From small twigs to mighty branches.  Not a tree touched the house, but they were laying on three of the four sides, being bent low by the wind and then snapping like toothpicks. 

“How could a straight-line wind from the west knock a tree down north to south?” we asked to no one in particular.

The yard was strewn with wooden shingles from the old barn, only recently retired from fifty years of use, it survived yet another gale, perhaps a little twisted and missing some of the shingles that held on for over fifty years, but standing none-the-less.

It was down by the driveway where the carnage was the worse.

The hayshed, a roof, open on all sides to allow the hay to have air circulate (no direct water could hit it from above and soak in, so the hay was properly ‘cured’), the hayshed was gone.  Or to be more precise, the lean-too that was one on the west side and during the farming years held all of our straw was gone.  The wind caught the lean-too and literally flung it across the yard, across the open fields for half a mile.  The tin and small boards flying through the air and rolling unhindered across the landscape.

The hayshed itself merely folded over, the four by fours snapping at the base from the force of the wind.

The destruction, though messy and impressive looking, was not that significant and would only warrant clean up, some massive cleanup, but aside from the hayshed, no other building would sustain a body blow (pun intended).

With no power to cook, we loaded Mom and little sister into the car and headed for the Red Apple for a bit to eat.