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The Wreckage
Coming home to a destroyed landscape.
While I was away enjoying my best friend, the Pacific Ocean, great food and old friends, my hometown of Austin — along with much of the south — experienced a cataclysmic ice storm.
Dubbed “Treepocalypse” in memory of the Great Snowpocalypse of 2021, this recent storm failed to deliver nice pretty fluffy white snow. Instead it coated our world with a thick layer of ice, sending motor vehicles helplessly floating along the roads like the dry ice pucks from Physics class — remember the ones they said would go on forever if there were no such thing as drag? Or resistance? Or gravity? Something.
Because we are blessed with a vast array of oak trees in many varieties, now we are left with broken limbs, shattered trees, and even uprooted giants smashing through roofs, cars, and fences. People reported lying awake at night for two nights, just listening to the shotgun cracks of trees splitting to the ground.
Many of our oaks are too stupid to shed their leaves in the fall. Instead they hang onto them through the winter, creating for us a spring leaf blizzard as if to remind us of how raking and mulching are supposed to be done. Evidently the trees believe us to be too stupid to remember how to clean up after them if we only get to do it once a year.