Knock Knock Knocking on Our Back Door — And Roof

For my birthday, G builds me something every year. (When he remembers and is physically able.) Last year he built me a tall standing bird feeder.

I love the bird feeder.

It isn’t fancy, and I’m perfectly okay with not-fancy. When I’m in the kitchen, there’s almost always at least a couple of birds in view. It’s the perfect height for a straight view through the kitchen window. Every time the door or window opens, we hear bird song. While the majority of our back-yard tenants are pigeons, we also see sparrows and a few I can’t identify. The avians noshing out on the bird feeder return the favor by eliminating most of the bug population in the area, even helping to make inroads against the unrelenting ant horde.

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A few days ago, we got smacked with the mother of all dust storms.

I’ve lived in Arizona since 1972 and have NEVER seen a dust storm on par with this one. It made the national news — and for once, it was justified. Normally dust storms look apocalyptic but are merely a nuisance, except to drivers. This one made me wonder if we’d still have a house left when it was done.

We went from this:

To this, in under five minutes.

Neither photo is edited other than cropping. It was actually darker than the second photo shows, and the red isn’t exaggerated. The power was out, the only light coming from my computer. My cell phone tried to compensate and brightened everything. The photo was taken just before 4pm. The sun doesn’t go down until 7pm-ish this time of year.

It was the first dust storm I experienced that was mean enough to mess up a house. Our roof took a beating, as you can see from missing-shingles photo at the top of the entry. For a while I was afraid the wind would send the roof sheathing airborne and take out our front windows — it was that crazy. Right after the bottom photo, I closed the curtains and moved to another part of the house. I couldn’t work with the power out anyway, and I didn’t like the idea of getting cut up if the window gave way.

After the dust storm did it’s thing, we got smacked by horizontal rain, which is the usual pattern for summer storms in the desert: dust storm, then rain. I’d already pressed a towel against the bottom threshold at the front door. If I hadn’t, our front entry and the surrounding carpet would have been drenched.

In the end, the damage wasn’t bad as we expected when we heard the roof thumping and crashing overhead, and saw shingles flying into the back yard. G called his handyman buddy, who drove out yesterday and did the repair for very little money. Dangerspouse, I couldn’t afford to fly Wifey out – not to mention she’d have died of heat stroke. It took exactly three bundles of shingles and a few hours in 100º-plus weather, but it got done.

Our house took the brunt of things, and the same thing happened about a year ago – albeit not nearly as bad. Neighboring homes were largely untouched both times.

G and I realized we’re uniquely positioned in a wind tunnel. In our neighborhood, there’s a vacant lot directly across the street from us — and another vacant lot behind that vacant lot, both surrounded by homes. The gap apparently serves to channel the nastiest winds directly at us.

I’d love to plant a handful of trees as a windbreak – but even if we could grow anything in our godforsaken front yard, I’m not sure we’d gain much by planting something tall enough for the wind to aim and let fly at us.

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So what, you ask, does all this have to do with knocking on our back door?

And what do the birds have to do with anything?

Alas, the bird feeder was also a casualty of the storm. It tumbled over a couple of times and broke apart. (G said it’s fixable. He has to wait for cooler temperatures to fix it, which is perfectly understandable.)

Here’s the thing. These birds are smart. When G is late feeding them, they knock on our back door, presumably with their beaks, as if to say, “B****, where’s my breakfast?” I’ve thought it was the neighbors before – G said nope, it’s the birds.

Needless to say, despite their favorite restaurant strewn in pieces on the ground, the morning after the storm they were knocking on our back door, expressing their indignation at our failure to layout their expected fare, storm damage be damned.