"Wall of Water Moves Into New England"

That was the top headline on Accuweather.com a few minutes ago. I wandered off to watch Will It Blend? videos thanks to a late-night post from debgeisler. By the time I turned my attention to this post, the Accuweather headline had changed to "Tornado Watches for Major East Coast Cities" with an "Hourly Tornado Threat Update" link immediately below the introductory text.

"Wall of Water" accurately describes what I've been going on just outside my office window for the last two hours. Intense, with winds to match. Glad I'm down in a hollow, protected from the worst of the winds.

I've just started heating some clam chowder; it's a good night for it.

Wind in theory and practice

In theory, I have something of a sense of the weird things wind can do. In practice, even. I well remember the tornado that hit Minneapolis in June of '81, the one that did a respectable job of shoving the neighbor's garage through Bob Hunter's back door.

I've seen some not-so-fair winds in my first two years here. Usually they leave the treetops doing the hootchie coochie and me glancing about, mentally measuring which ones would land on the house if their next back bend proved a bit beyond their level of endurance. But as I wrote a few hours ago, I'm down in a hollow. It's really rather protected.

So while I knew in theory that high winds could rip a window box off its brackets and send it crashing to the ground, the little voice inside my head would have said, "yeah, at somebody else's house, not mine" had I ever considered the actual possibility of such a thing happening. And if I hadn't been sitting right here, about 2-3 feet and one exterior wall away from said window box, I would never have credited the wind with the feat. Surely it must have been a deer wandering up and getting startled, knocking it loose. That would have explained the wild gyrations of the bird feeder, too.

Only it wasn't a deer. Not a deer, not any other nocturnal creature. It was all wind, roaring and blowing. Crash went the window box. The arc of the feeder exceeded 90 degrees.

I didn't know it could do that. Not in practice, at least.

Sometime in here, the wind tore the top off the Rubbermaid bin that sits just outside the mudroom door. The bin started out empty (it holds packages that arrive when I'm not here), but neither it or its top blew away. By the time I noticed it, the rain was within two inches of the top edge. The wind had knocked the downspout loose -- a common enough occurrence -- and the bin ended up catching some of the water pouring off the roof.

I put the window box back in place, tried to do what I could to bend the brackets back into place, and did what I could to comfort the pansies. Then I emptied the bin, reattached the downspout, and stared into the darkness, trying to get a better reading on just what it's like out there. It's still warm. Far warmer than I ever think of mid-November as being. Yep. It's the middle of the night and it's still 60 degrees Fahrenheit on the back deck.Then the wind started picking up again, and I decided inside was the better place to be.