New Revenue?

     My husband and I were sitting on the back deck, conversing about the days' events when he said, "Look at that."  I glanced up, mid sentence, and there it was, a huge dark gray cloud, pushing in from the west.  Along the front edge of this line of darkness was a silvery blue line, I grabbed my phone and began to video.

     I always thought I would like to be a storm chaser, living on the edge of danger and excitement.  Two minutes later, I was hightailing it to the basement.  My husband stopped along the way to open the south door to the front porch.  "What are you doing?", I hollered. 

     "I want to watch!", he answered.  He opened the door, Runtly shot out on the porch and the sideways flying hail was skidding across the floor.  It wasn't long before he and the dog were right behind me going down the basement stairs.

     The chaos that ensued from that point probably did not last a total of five minutes.  When we emerged from the deep, our street looked like a war zone.  Trees and limbs were down as far as the eye could see.  It wasn't just our street, the entire town had been hit and hit hard.

     Many decades old trees had been completely uprooted and power lines were down all over town.  Of course, this meant no electricity.  Living in an age of many creature comforts, having no electricity tends to make folks grumpy.  Not only does it make people grumpy, it messes with the senses.  Somewhere during Runtly's last outing for the night, I stepped in cat poo.  I then proceeded to track it through the kitchen, up the stairs and the majority of it fell off my shoe right outside the bedroom door.  My shoes were right by the side of the bed all night and I never smelled a thing.  I guess not being able to run the ceiling fan kept the odor at bay, not to mention being so hot and sticky that smelling nasty cat poo was the least of my worries.

     The power was out for over 24 hours and it is hard to tell how many light switched I turned on out of habit.  I did discover that one could still clean with a broom.

     One week later, the streets are still lined with piles of broken limbs, chainsawed tree parts and wet rotting leaves.  Once again, folks are getting grumpy with the mess.  What most people do not understand is, there is no place to put hundreds of trees....all at once.  Even if there was a huge open field where all the debris could be placed, it would be impossible to get to the middle of it because of the ground being saturated with rain.  I think even a bulldozer would lose the match between man made power and Mother Nature.

     So, here's my idea.  If we had access to a large open field, we could build a catapult.  It would have to be a huge one, but what the heck, the bigger, the better.  We could load it down with tree debris and fling it out to the middle of the field.  After about three or four big loads, we could fill it with a few old tires, pour on some gasoline, light it up and let that baby fly.  Not only would this be a sight to see, it'd be great fun.  We could charge admission to watch the catapult in action and have a special fee for being able to pull the catapult trigger.

     I think it will work.  We may not make a lot of money, but maybe enough to replace a few trees.