Being human

I wonder what it is about the human experience that we must see destruction for ourselves. The rain left the corners of our basement damp for the first time since we've moved into our house. It also blew in the nearly rotted off side door to our garage. Amazingly, all 16 of the trees on our property stayed standing (our lot is 60 by 100, and yes, that is a crazy amount of trees). Our neighbors with pine trees didn't fare as well. This morning, I noticed that the house up the street we made an offer on before we saw this one lost the giant pine tree in its front yard - it broke in two and fell over into their driveway onto their car. We tried to imagine the sound a tree falling on one's roof must make, and the structural damage it might cause.

We had to reroute several times yesterday because the roads along the Raritan River were flooded. We saw several houses with trees fallen onto them. The mom of one of Lauren's friends posted this picture to Facebook:And went down to Donaldson Park to see how high the Raritan was. It was pretty damn high:
You can see that the new baseball fields are under about 3 feet of water. The edge of the river about a half mile from where it usually is.
The playground we were just playing on last week. The picnic table we were sitting at is submerged. It is still raining today, but it looked like the Raritan had receded a bit and the downed trees are fewer as they get cleaned up.