Living in the Midwest means that one is used to storms bareling through and leaving behind downed trees, fallen branches and electrical wires. There was the super-storm, mini-maybe-a-twister in 2008 - then we had one in June, then again this past Monday morning, July 11.
I may be used to storms but they don't usually happen in the mornings, and a Monday to boot. In an instant, as I was preparing for an office meeting, the house went dark, the wind picked up, and the sky turned purple. It was over in about 10 minutes - Alan May, who lives just north of me, wrote about the storm yesterday: Begone, before someone drops a house on you, too!.
While I am always happy that there are no serious injuries, we did suffer one 
monumental loss: the Bicentennial Tree on Michigan Avenue in Wilmette. It had survived around 256 years of other storms long before any of us were here.
The Bicentennial Tree, was an ash, which makes it all the more remarkable because of the Emerald Ash Borer scourge which is decimating ash trees throughout the area. This was one ash that was being aggressively treated and the results were thought to be encouraging.
When I read that people had been congregating around the tree in Wilmette, taking photos, and picking up keepsakes of the bark, I thought that was weird. But when I got there today, I understood the impulse to take a small piece of history home with me. Not only did I pick up a hunk of bark, I also took home several smaller branches whose leaves were quickly wilting. These will go into my composter - to be distributed into my own soil next summer - thus keeping the Bicentennial tree alive, at least for me.
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