What Happened At Our House After Church Today

First of all, don't worry. No injuries, no apparent structural damage to the house. We were in the kitchen eating lunch, listening to the wind bully its way against the house when there was a massive sound -- like thunder but lower, longer, and much closer. We rushed to the other side of the house and through Parker's windows we saw this:

We have asked our neighbors (it's their tree) repeatedly over the last four years to please, please, please cut down the obviously dead, precariously perched tree that stood right over our youngest child's bedroom. Every time we asked, they said something like, "Oh yeah, you bet. We'll get to it this weekend." For four years.

They abandoned their house three years ago. They moved somewhere else in the area and just never came back to the house. They mow the grass three or four times a summer so they don't get fined by the city, but otherwise, they don't do a thing to maintain their rotting house and property. We know for a fact they haven't paid their property taxes because it was in the paper. I doubt they're bad people -- they're probably just crushed under by poverty, underemployment, and a lack of education like so many others around here. But if they'd just come over with the chainsaws I know they have and spent an afternoon before now, I wouldn't have had to put a call into my insurance company and they wouldn't have to be sweating bullets about how they're going to make up for the damage done.

Ah well. Hopefully, it will all work out for the best. I know the real blessing is that no one was hurt -- but if we managed to get a new roof out of it, that would be nice too.