The Winds played with us like we were legos,
...and when it was over, there were fewer limbs for swings, berths for birdhouses, and nooks for squirrels.
On the night of January 2022, Claremont, California, suffered the loss of over 300 trees. For a more factual account and professional photos, read this week’s Claremont Courier, Remembering Claremont's January 2022 Windstorm.” If you want to know how it felt, read on.
She slumber-slurs “wind” the first time she rouses. Slips back to sleep.
Is it twenty minutes or two hours later? She awakens to a broken record with a recurring groove-scratch. She has no control over whatever has happened. Fear of the unknown roller-coasters in her head. She hears hooves; she tries not to imagine zebras. She doesn’t yet know that one-third of her solar panels will never be found. Two years of the Ten Percent Happier App, she hears Joseph Goldstein ask her if what she is thinking is useful. She stops catastrophizing.
She gazes at the sunrise, orange, streaked horizontally with yellow and red. Colors made vivid by the aftermath of the storm. Blue, flirting with clouds, changing hues, but always vivid, an orange so orange and a blue so intensely blue she is momentarily transported to the orange and blue of her teenage Friday Night Lights, her Cerro Gordo Broncos, you are either wearing orange and blue padded uniforms on a bright green field or standing in the end zone, waiting for halftime, wearing a navy marching band uniform with bright orange braids and brass buttons. She remembers the importance of going for first downs. Resilience. Perseverance. She steels herself to go outside. She surveys the damage.
Her solar panels look like oversized dominoes that a giant had tired of playing with, became impatient, and backhanded the lot. The panels are faceless hostages, tethered in torturous disarray, suspended midair between heaven and earth, larger than life, a MOMA installation. Some barely visible, askew, peeking over the flat part of the roof, snagged claws clinging to roofing material sprouting fasteners and brackets; others are half on an oversized pot of vulnerable camellias, half on the sturdy box hedge; others cover the Bermuda grass in complete surrender resembling wrecked tanning beds.
Even as she regroups, she understands that it is one thing to lose manufactured conveniences; it is another thing for a community to lose a vast collection of living things, 300 trees, at least 70 in the California Botanic Garden, many old and significant. Everywhere she looks, stability, comfort, and shade are diminished. There are fewer limbs for swings, berths for birdhouses, nooks for squirrels.
During the following weeks and months, professional arborists run tractors, log loaders, cranes, stump grinders, and chainsaws to perform triage on damaged trees, uprooted shrubs, and broken branches. Everywhere she looks, pieces are missing.
The community continues to honor the Chinese proverb: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second best time is today.
Change what you can; accept what you can’t. Be grateful for nature. Thanks for listening. Thanks for reading. See you next week.
Michele,
I joined your class at The Writers Studio in May 2020, and I am forever changed. I’m very grateful.
Janice Hoffmann writes Stories by Janus
https://claremont-courier.com/latest-news/remembering-claremonts-january-2022-windstorm-76489/