Morning before Rita: the  largest hardware store in town takes numbers for the last generators coming to town.

"The truck is late, we don't know when it is coming.  It will have only ten generators on it, if it gets here."

We are 250 miles from the coast. Rita will not make landfall for eighteen more hours.   Already we can see her clouds

We Are open!  They have plenty ice in the morning, I buy lots of canned goods. The rain and wind starts just at dusk, around ten pm, a large limb falls from our tree onto the neighbor's house.  A few punctures of the roof on the den, but no structural damage.  We lose power about 3 a.m.

In the morning there's lots of wind

. . .and rain

Our three oak trees lighten their load

The street is flooding because the drains are stopped up with debris, my neighbors clean them out, as the postman(!) passes delivering the mail with the eye of the storm just sixty miles away

The street beside our house

The rain is nearly over, but the winds keep dropping branches.

This is the first time since 1991 I've really worried about these tall trees, they  bend and swirl with the lashing winds.   We were fortunate though, the only damage  except for windfall limbs was on my neighbor's house and that wasn't serious, just scary.

We were spared a direct hit.  The eye wall passed  along the other  side of the Sabine river just 50 miles away.  This is across from my son's apartment.

This tree toppled between two garages with cars in them.  Didn't  hit either

Not so lucky here; the top of the tree is in a house.  No major structural damage though.  The owner was watching as the tree fell.  If I wrote what he said at the time, I'd have to delete it.

Power lines down all over, we got power back up late the same night, but some people were without service for two weeks.

At the Public Library, a tree narrowly missed the building

Limbs crashed through the fence at the American Cemetery

Several days later, Wayne came to take my limb out of Nick's roof

John does delicate surgery with a chainsaw avoiding having the rest of the limb fall into the house.

Seems out of context, but this is a cotton field near my house.  about half the crop is on the ground, and the rest is soaked.  A big loss considering  some 6000 acres in Natchitoches Parish were ready for harvest.