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car crushed by a tree

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

As we returned Geoff's tent and other loaners and did some shopping, the clear skies and strong sun gave way to dark clouds.

And then we were in a nasty cold front. I've seen stronger rain in Toronto in 2011 than I remember in times past, but this was so bad that Mari exclaimed, "It's like a typhoon!"

We'd been in the T & T Asian Supermarket when the rain had started. I'd been fretting about the colour of the skies to the north for a while already, and had thought we might eat in the parking lot while waiting for the whole thing to blow over. But a pregnant woman was yacking into a garbage bin when I swept by the front door to pick up Mari, Kenny, and the groceries, and that scotched those plans.

We drove home under steadily worsening rain until we got home at a bare crawl. It was raining far too hard to even consider running up the stairs with the grocery bags, so we ate our sushi in car.

There were several loud crashing sounds during the worst of it, but we couldn't see a thing. It was only half an hour later, after things had eased up and we'd taken everything inside and I was returning the rental car that I saw the worst of the noise-making events: a car not twenty meters from our parking spot had been crushed by the falling top half of a willow tree. Yikes!

Picking my way through unpowered stop lights and dodging felled branches I was glad to be living in a city where a) such weather is unusual and b) I knew it would all be cleaned up promptly. Still: yikes!