more cemetery work

The Hubbard Hill Cemetery was hit with wicked straight line winds during an isolated thunderstorm last Thursday PM. Neighbors say there has never been another wind like it. The poor oak trees around the house survived but a few were shredded to near stumps. The house escaped major damage because scaffolding surrounding the project caught all the flying branches before they got to any windows or restored wood. The old Hill's Prairie post office that the Sartains had just set on a new foundation was rudely shoved about 10' splitting the entire building open at the corners and tossing the porch another twenty feet further north. The trees on the place took the brunt of the damage though. Believe the trees may have been under stress from the drought and so were more vulnerable, the snapped branches looked an unhealthy dry yellow inside. A damned old mesquite in the cemetery shed a 6" thick branch that flew about knee high horizontally east until it met up with the freshly restored cast iron fence. Four headstones were mowed down along the way and one of the blessed little concrete finials was snapped off at the narrowest part of the base by a strategically flying branch. Two other headstones on the north side of the cemetery were blown over; they were the two tallest, flattest, and thinnest designs of the bunch. One of the headstones is of Damaris Pope and her infant child Willie, maybe the most poignant marker there. I had repaired hers for the second time just a few weeks ago after a possible unrepentant act of vandalism had knocked it over and broken it in several pieces. This time the wind blew it in the opposite direction and rebroke the epoxied fracture. Sigh. Another smaller marker of little Louie Hubbard simply toppled off the base at a weak mortar joint atop restored delaminated sandstone layers, a new dowel through the whole mess may be required to fix this one. Seems unfair somehow that the place was in such disrepair for decades and now just after a thorough restoration a freak windstorm comes along to show us who's really boss.