Mother Nature is a Cruel Mistress

The first week of June a little storm blew in, as happens in these parts on June afternoons.

I rounded up the kids from outside and told them to throw their toys in the garage, anticipating that they'd be out playing again in a few. After all, one of Denver's mottos is "if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes."

Peter arrived home unexpectedly early, just as the first big fat raindrops started splatting on the ground, so he parked in the driveway and helped me grab the trashcans that were out for trash day so they wouldn't wash away. Then we ducked inside amidst peals of thunder to get a little work done in the basement office. As nature would have it, though, we weren't about to get any work done. It started with a few little clinks, and I saw some bits of hail landing in the basement window well--nothing new, since we usually get one or two good ringers each summer. But soon the clinks became big, loud, heavy clunks. We ultimately joined the kids at the window to watch the full beat down, which looked like this:

It lasted for a good 30-40 minutes, and we cringed as the gumball-sized hail pummeled Peter's car. I'll admit that I was just as distraught thinking about the little baby peachlings that I've invested so much care and concern in this year, despite the fact that we've done nothing to actually make the tree bear fruit besides turn on the sprinkler system and pay the water bill. It looks like we'll still get a few peaches, but the majority were damaged or pelted to the ground where they met their sorry end.

Poor little peachlings.

When all was said and done and the storm had passed, it looked like a day of reckoning outside. Our deck cover for our patio set was shredded along with our window screens, and the trees and plants were trashed.

Later, we discovered strike marks from the hail all over our exterior paint, and inside we also had a nice corner of drywall which now looks like this from floor to ceiling:

It was damp to the touch, with the water damage clearly having warped and discolored the floor, too. So we decided to put in an insurance claim and were shocked that they came back with over $20k in house damage needing to be repaired, some of which we didn't even realize was there. Come to find out, our old neighborhood barely three miles away was at the epicenter of this storm and sustained even worse damage -- one friend told me they had over $38k in damage, and every single house for miles was affected.

Homes in our old neighborhood - some were totally defaced, like these with completely decimated shutters.

Basically, our little town is going to be on big construction site for the summer. Hopefully we saw the worst of the summer storms, or if there's another it will hit before the renovations start! Here are the repairs we'll be spending our summer orchestrating:

• complete roof replacement
• new paint for the exterior of the house
• power washing/re-staining the entire fence due to surface damage
• same for the deck
• a new main floor picture window due to damage to the outer seal (which would turn into another drywall/leak problem as pictured above if not fixed)
• opening up the living room wall, checking/treating for mold, replacing drywall, and re-painting the room - which in our open-concept home will be half of the entire first floor
• repairing a small portion of hardwood floor from the same water damage, and because it's impossible to match hardwood stain, all of the adjacent wood flooring needs to be refinished and re-stained. Well, that "adjacent flooring" flows without a single break throughout our entire first floor, so moving literally all of the first floor in order to refinish it is going to get really interesting... 
• Oh, right and Peter's car with all its hail dents and need for a new windshield is its own claim.

Checking out the roof.

While it sounds nice in some ways to be getting all these fixes out of one lousy storm, it's accompanied by a nice deductible and, I'm sure, will end up being a source of frustration since we didn't exactly plan to set aside our whole summer (and potentially fall) for a bunch of renovations. So we're buckling in for the ride.

- - -

Another sad fallout of this storm was its affect on our next-door "neighbors," a red-tailed hawk family who had been nesting in our friends' big grand cottonwood tree next door for some months. Our neighbor said it looked like the bottom of the nest might have been compromised after the hail, and a few days later we also saw some tiny birds continually diving at the hawks in the air and near their nest in the tree (presumably because they felt threatened by the hawks).

Little birds chasing the poor, majestic hawks.

Our neighbors found the nest on the ground the next day, with two little injured fledglings that couldn't fly yet on the ground. They were able to get wildlife rescue on the scene pretty quickly, who took the injured fledglings to hopefully recover since they wouldn't have made it on their own.

It's destroyed my mama heart to see the hawks circling and screeching in the following days, looking for their lost babies. It's been a real tragedy of sorts in the neighborhood -- especially for our next door neighbors who shared their territory so closely with the hawk family, and our neighbor across the street who has recently become a pretty serious birdwatcher and passed her love and knowledge on to all the kids. There is some hope, though. Though the one baby hawk didn't make it, we learned yesterday that the other, which our neighbor friends named Nari, seems to be doing well and has been placed with a foster mom, another red-tailed hawk, who is taking good care of her. Hopefully in a few months she will be able to be released back into the wild and live on to a happy outcome of adulthood, even though mama and papa bird are at a sad, sad loss.

Sweet little Nari - picture courtesy of our neighbor.

In the end, despite the headaches and major renovations, we are still lucky for numerous reasons...we're lucky that around here, Mother Nature usually graces us with more beauty than destruction, that the storm didn't turn into something worse like a tornado, and that we didn't have any flooding. And I'm certain both mama and papa hawk would agree that we are beyond lucky to have our whole family safe, sound, and under one [leaky but fixable] roof!