She huffed, puffed, and blew my house over

Sunny, windy, 56

Yesterday as mentioned, my sister Connie came out and helped with the wood. My sis and I have spent many many hours cutting wood ever since we were girls. We spent a good portion of our summers helping our dad and sometimes our brother cut wood for the fireplace. Our summer cottage had no heat, and no electricity until I was 7. We got "running water" inside when my grandpa installed a pitcher-pump on the kitchen sink when I was a kid. This was our father's house when he was a boy. His mother, our grandmother, was born in a logging camp. We still have the miniature cant hook the blacksmith made her as a gift. It is a precious momento. Cutting wood is simply part of our heritage.

Yesterday I was out in the field running the chainsaw, cutting up more of the wood that had to come down for the fence. Connie walked up, pulled her gloves on, and started grabbing branches and tossing them in the back of the truck. We immediately fell into a familiar rhythm, not needing to talk or even really look at eachother, concentrating on the work at hand and knowing what the other would do before she did it.

When the truck was full, I cut off the saw and we drove over to unload at the huge brush pile. The wind was so high, all we had to do was lift the biggest branches straight up into the air, and the wind would loft them onto the top of the pile. We remarked on how high the wind gusts were, must have been some 50-60 mph. While we were there, I heard a scratchy, metallic noise, which caught my attention. It sounded out of place. I looked around, and much to my horror, I saw my great big pig hut lying upside down on top of my brand new fence!! The screechy noise was the metal roof scratching against the fence wire as it rocked and pitched in the wind. No Way!


It had flipped up and over, right onto the one day old fence! The posts held fast, but the weight of the hut crushed down the woven wire.
I brought up the tractor and tried lifting it by the 2X6 cross brace. Once lifted, I backed up hoping to drag the house off the wire. Unkown to me, the wire was actually hooked around a screw in the metal roof. As I pulled back, the fence held onto the house, and the result was a snapping sound as my main cross member broke in half. Sigh. This is what it looked like.

After about an hour or more of Connie and I crawling under the house and trying to remove two sheet metal screws in a 6 inch space, encased in very tight wire squares while having dirt constantly blown into our eyes, we got the screws out, and we were actually able to simply lift the house up and slide it off using spare fence posts as rollers under it. There it sits right now. It's still too windy to even attempt to right it. Besides that, I am not at all sure how to get her back up again without destroying it. All I can do is come up with a plan, and hope for the best.

Today I straightened and re-attached that section of fence as best as I could. I think it will do to hold pigs and cows in. Went around the perimeter of the pasture and picked up some old junk in one corner. Put up two bluebird houses, cleaned the barn, changed the flat tire on the trailer, mounted the hitch wiring harness on the truck, took the tractor chains up to the barn mow and cleaned up the garage, and took Dottie for a walk up to the top of the hill. It was a beautiful spring day! We had a nice showwer all night last night, and the grass suddenly turned bright green over night. It really glowed against the bright blue sky.