This past week was a bit of a doozy. Lost power and a way out of our dead end street on Thursday morning when a tree fell across our road and took a power pole with it. A neighbor who’s an electrician and I cut the way out for the street and cleared one travel lane despite the fire department’s protests, while two other neighbors with plows cleared what they could. Power was restored Sunday night, but none of the crews cleared the road obstruction, so another neighbor with a bigger tractor than the rest of us rolled up and cleared it.

I’m fortunate enough to be able to carry on phone conversations while I’m doing the tasks for our nursery, so I started calling the town manager and the chiefs of the fire and EMS crews to start a conversation about having a real plan for the next time it happens. And it will, because Maine passed a law several years ago that incentivized the power utility to do as little as possible maintaining the trees near the lines. I started a text chain with the neighborhood to keep them updated on what’s being discussed and to solicit feedback and suggestions for the solutions we’d like to present to the town, and that text chain has gotten the neighbors offering further assistance to each other to help recover from the storm (does my little socialist heart proud!). Folks have been dropping off cookies and stopping by to thank me, even though I keep telling them it’s just my way of repaying them for being wonderful neighbors.

In other news, all the plants I stupidly potted before the storm survived!