Got back to Perth last Saturday night, preparing ourselves to see the disaster area that was our house after the storm of March 2010 on the 22nd had hit it hard. By some miracle Jeanette’s power went out during the storm so she gathered up her fridge food and brought it over to our place to use our fridge. And what a good thing she did because rain was pouring in through various holes in the roof including the shattered roof window (see photos),  and the kitchen light was shorting and looking like burning the house down!

She turned the light off and with Christopher started the big clean-up, and Tris arrived to help after shoring up his ceiling which was threatening to fall in. And on Saturday Blaine made a good go at cleaning up the broken glass in the playroom. They all had a busy week, which was very kind of them ‘cos they had their own problems to deal with!

So now we’ve seen it, started on the sorting out and repairing which will take ages. I remembered my cousin who runs a building company and he’s coming tomorrow which will be a blessing.

But this morning when I was continuing to clean up the leaves etc that fell when the trees were shredded with hail stones, I realised what had been missing – bird calls! Our garden is normally alive with birds, and they come back year after year to make babies in our trees. But there was nothing, no calls at all. That’s when it hit me – the tragedy of the storm is that so many birds were killed by the torrential rain and massive hail stones. I’d found one of them the morning after we got back, a decapitated wattle bird which Tom and Thea helped me to bury (see grave in the photo, amongst the hundreds of green pine leaves which were shredded from our pine tree). So this afternoon, alone in the house, I let myself cry because I’ll really really miss them all.

Then the miracle happened, well 2. First of all a “28” parrot called from the tree outside our study. And then a butcher bird came to have a drink from the bird bath. No sound apart from its wings, but it looked very well.

It’s a miracle it survived, and I was very happy to see it again:-)