Wednesday was a busy, errand filled day that ended with freaky weather. At a time of night when the children are normally tucked in bed and Doug and I are using Netflix to catch up on something the rest of the world watched a year ago, we were multitasking ourselves to exhaustion. Three children, two adults, two German Shepherds, a cat and a snake were piled in our basement bedroom. We watched cartoons on DVD, listened to the police scanner on a laptop, tweeted, facebooked, ran up and down the stairs for snacks and peeked at the damage outside in between the waves of hail, wind and lightning. I know what I accomplished on Wednesday.

A few hours after we finally got everyone settled, it was time to get up and have a normal Thursday. Instead of spending the morning on dishes and laundry, I stared at images of damage. Instead of getting dressed and running errands, I wandered our street, talking to all my neighbors who were also wandering the street. I managed to do the afternoon school pickups, but I don’t remember how. I know there was a lot of very slow driving past trees that were no longer vertical. There were trees on roads, trees on signs, trees on power lines, trees on houses, trees on cars and trees on lawns.

I don’t know how I managed it, but I lost an entire day. Thursday was spent stumbling about in a brainless, zombie daze. Nothing got done. The lawn is solid leaves and broken branches, but I stared at it instead of cleaning the mess. The cars are pitted and covered in filth, but I didn’t even pick the branches out of the windshield wipers. The roof of the house looks like a forest floor, but I didn’t do anything to make it better. My vegetables and house plants are completely crushed and the flower pots that held them are shattered. I know I need to sort it into compost and trash, but I haven’t.

Our family is unharmed and our damage is minimal, but I lost an entire day on what? I wasn’t pouting or weeping. I was just… nothing. Maybe it was the thoughts of what could have happened that shut my brain down. Those thoughts are too horrible to allow for even a second. Today, I started the cleanup that is going to take forever. I swept the deck and found it covered in hail dimples, like the cars. Then, I sat down and stared blankly. The sound of chainsaws in every direction makes my stomach hurt.

I would have been a terrible pioneer.