I stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at the disaster in front of me. My flashlight lanced through the darkness finding my favorite chair, now little more than a lump of broken wood and fabric in the corner, at least the parts of it that you could still see sticking out from under splintered truss, shingles, sheet rock, and oh yes, really big tree parts. Pieces of debris that were hardly recognizable littered the destroyed family room as well as a good part of the kitchen and living room. Insulation, splinters of wood and chunks of sheetrock covered the kitchen floors and counters, with the living room in similarly disastrous condition, where the wind had spread debris from the addition into the main portion of the house. My huge plasma TV that I had enjoyed watching so much was a huge pile of shattered glass, a long section of two by four sticking through the wall where it had once been hanging. The slashing rain poured in through the mostly missing roof and outer wall as the wind whipped the branches of the huge tree that had turned my cozy home into a war zone. The darkness thankfully hid most of the damage from my eyes, allowing the devastation to sink in one circle at a time, as the rain quickly soaked into my pajama bottoms and slippers. I knew from years as a firefighter that daylight would give me the complete shock.
I spent the next several hours working by lantern light, nailing tarps over the openings from the destroyed addition to the rest of the house, covering my equipment in the exercise room and trying to reclaim what I could from the wind and rain. Daylight broke shortly after the summer storm, allowing me to see the full scope of the devastation. I had spent months building the addition, laying hardwood and putting up sheetrock and fussing over each piece hardwood trim. Each piece of destroyed trim wood represented at least a half hours worth of labor, sanding, fitting, staining, polyurethaning and finally putting into place. I spent much longer on the task than most people would have, but I enjoyed every minute of it, and I knew every flaw in the project, from the one oak floor plank near the wall that accidently didn't get nailed down and had a tendency to shift a few fractions of an inch, to the slight gap in the pine wood work behind what used to be a handmade oak entertainment center. Now that too was a total disaster. Thank god for good insurance!
I walked around the outside of the house, surveying the devastation. The hundred plus year old tree along the tree line next to my house had been snapped off like a toothpick. The base section clearly looked twisted and shredded, along with several other smaller trees. Smaller was a relative term here, the large tree being more than three feet in diameter with foot diameter branches larger than most of the trees growing near it. The only thing that I knew that could cause this kind of carnage to this size tree was a tornado, which meant I was actually pretty lucky. I hadn't even heard a storm warning and was still sound asleep when I felt my whole world rock. The whole end of the house where I had added on looked pulverized above the foundation. The walls that weren't flattened were shoved out or down by the collapsed roof, the trunk of the huge tree stuck out the side of the house like some kind of grotesque appendage. I almost laughed thinking that the tree looked like it was trying to fuck my house... Better to laugh than cry.
The insurance adjuster made pretty good time, getting there shortly after the power company arrived to set a new pole to replace what was left of the splintered one. We walked around the structure and through it as he took notes and pictures. He offered me hotel stay, which I decided to refuse, most of the house being livable yet. Before he left he gave me a sheet of known reputable contractors, and had transferred $40,000 into my checking account to get started with, telling me to keep my receipts it would all be covered, including $20 per hour for any labor I did. Thank god for replacement cost coverage. He told me it was up to me how much I wished to contract and how much I wished to do myself, understanding that I had done all this work myself the first time. The tree service he arranged arrived shortly after he left, and I stood and watched while it took them nearly five hours to remove a tree that the storm tossed in a few seconds.
That night I sat alone on my bed watching the small 20" TV and eating a McDonalds burger, most of my food being spoiled by the nearly ninety degree heat and the twelve hour loss of power, not that I had anyplace to cook it at the moment. I finally fell asleep from exhaustion well before the evening news came on.
The next morning broke sunny and pleasant, with temps in the high seventies at sunup. The birds chirping finally woke me and I got started on my day. First order of business was to contact a maid service to help me clean the mess up. That took all of five minutes. The contractor was a bit more of a problem. I looked at the long list and did a few quick web searches. One in particular looked pretty good, specializing in renovations and reconstruction for thirty years. Sounded good to me so I called and made an appointment with the receptionist for them to come see the damage that afternoon. They were from the city, over a hundred miles away, but didn't seem to be bothered by that.
The maid service arrived about an hour later. I was already hard at work sorting through things and deciding what in the living room could be salvaged and what was going to have to go. I was initially startled when I heard the knock on the door, but quickly recovered and showed two good looking ladies of Latin origin, into the living room. One of them spoke English well, but the other required a bit of translation, and I am not a foreign language speaker at all. I showed them what needed to be done and the two quickly got their equipment and went at it, picking up pieces of wood and sheet rock to expose the insulation covered floor. That damn paper insulation turned out to be a real bitch once it dried. The ladies resorted to using plastic scrapers to get most of it up and then scrub brushes to work the remaining mess from the hardwood and tile.
I didn't pay all that much attention to them at first. They were both in their thirties, a few years younger than I was, well, maybe more than a few, and both were pretty well endowed in the breast department. I was working on sorting out wet books from the living room bookcases as one of them, Lania I think her name was, scrubbed insulation on her hands and knees. I had the air going, but it really didn't do much good in this part of the house, most of the cool air dumping out of the broken duct work inside the smashed attic. The eighty plus degree humid atmosphere was making all of us sweat and I was beginning to sweat even harder as I watched her large tits, apparently braless, swinging around inside her t-shirt, wet with sweat and wash water. She saw me staring at her and smiled politely as she rocked back on her knees to stretch her back. I don't think she realized how visible her tits were to me through the wet material as it pulled tight across her chest as she rolled her arms and shoulders back to stretch the muscles that had to be getting stiff.
"Too bad you don't understand me. You are one fine looking woman." I said quietly, smiling at her. "Your tits look really nice poking through your shirt."
