The rain started several hours ago, as a gentle pitter-pat.  Now it's pouring, but the wind hasn't started up yet.

 Vermont doesn't get many hurricanes.  Once, long ago, my father made us come outside one night in wind and rain because you could smell salt air, blowing in from the Atlantic a couple hundred miles away.  It was weird.

But my most recent experience with a hurricane was 2003, when one that also started with an I - Isabel - blew through and broke my giant willow tree which then smashed the tin shed, and destroyed the north end of the dog fence.  This may have been the official beginning of Dogpatch.  The back yard was never the same again.

The front yard isn't what it was, either, but that took a combination of the town road department cutting half the roots off my century-old maple trees for better drainage on the lane, and a big thunderstorm last summer.  Two of the four giants toppled over, filling the front door so I had to go out the back for a while.  

Simple physics, people.  It's a good thing to remember. You cut off half the roots of a tree, and it is likely to fall over in a high wind, especially if it's a maple.  

Anyway, now I'm wondering what Irene is going to do.  She could take out the two remaining butchered maples along the lane.  I don't think she can do much to the willow.  It has survived and grown up suckers in quantity, and doesn't seem to intend to disappear anytime soon.  The giant lilac was crushed by the maple, and is similarly resurrecting itself, slowly.  

That's the corpse of the giant maple in the background.  I kept it as reminder to the road department about the physics thing and maples.

I have a few other maples in a tree line along the south border of Dogpatch, but mostly what I have is a family of locust trees, ranging from giant great-grandparents to scarily fast-growing adults to kids and babies (some of whom I have to abort because there are only so many locust trees I can handle).  They are strange and fabulous trees - they grow very tall, and they flower in June, exuding a tropical perfume that brings bumblebees from miles around.  A guy who came by to sell me on his wood chopping last summer, when the maples were lying across the front yard, told me I was in grave danger from those locust trees that cluster around the southeast corner of Dogpatch.   I was just asking to be killed, in his opinion, if I didn't take them out. 

So I suppose it's just possible - because anything is possible - that Irene will smash one or more of the giant locusts down on me and this will be the last thing I ever write, but I doubt it.  When I say family of locusts, I'm not really being metaphorical.  Locusts reproduce two ways.  They can come up by seed from the flowers, but around Dogpatch, the ones that thrive have grown from roots extended by the parents and grandparents.  They are connected by yards of thick locust rope,  and they intend to stay connected.  

Really, I'm more afraid of my road department than I am of hurricanes.  But you never know.  I may have a different opinion in 24 hours.