Beryl took only a tree, yet it feels like much more

After hours of bending in the wind, the backyard tree came down with a crash. The whole thing had been ripped from its roots with one strong gust.

It was startling, and after surveying the damage briefly, I cried in the kitchen while my husband reassured me everything was OK. We were all OK. That’s what mattered. And it is.

But still I cried.

In the second time in as many months, a powerful storm rocked our Houston neighborhood, toppling branches and trees and filling our ditches to the brim. This time it was Hurricane Beryl, which at its peak was the strongest to form so early in the Atlantic.

My husband is used to hurricanes and tropical storms. He grew up here and has lived through his fair share: Alicia, Allison, Rita, Ike.

During Alison, he was stranded on the freeway and spent the night in his Nissan Maxima by Magic Island. He remembers Hooters stayed open. He blames Rita for the loss of his grandfather. He died that night when the old folks home lost power. When he looked at the forecast ahead of Harvey, I believed him when he said we should leave town.

So this was my first true hurricane in my 10 years in Houston. Just a Category 1, my husband said confidently several times overnight as I fretted over the windows and the children.

Even still, there were fatalities. More tragedies that become part of the collective Houston lore each hurricane season.

Our memories full of our own traumas and heavy with our neighbors’ too. Overnight, I kept hearing the voice of a young single mother I interviewed after Harvey. How she awoke to find her floor replaced by a lake. How she crouched atop her kitchen counters in her Greenspoint apartment, clutching her baby as the water rose higher.

We lost a tree. That’s it. We are all OK, and that’s what matters.

Most of us can say the same. Some of us can’t.

The tree in our backyard was more than two stories tall. It had twisting sturdy branches and a small patch of green leaves that always seemed to spring back to life after winter before the rest of the yard.

A few months after we moved into the house with our 1-year old, my husband and father went to the store and bought a red and yellow Little Tykes swing. They hung it from the lowest branch using a metal chain.

Sometimes, I would glance outside to the backyard, a modest but lush bit of land behind our nearly 100-year-old Heights bungalow. There it was, this hearty tree that had seen many generations, ornamented with the plastic swing. How was this mine? I remember marveling to myself. The house, the kid, the family, the swing. The tree.

Life had changed quickly for me. I moved to Houston in 2014. Met my future husband that year and fell quickly in love. By spring we were planning a wedding and I was looking for dresses that could accommodate a four-month bump.

In some versions of such a story, these things happen as surprises, maybe even mistakes. In my version, it was luck that I had somehow fallen into a family. After years of tortured and tumultuous dating, tracing a line of heartache from city to city, I had found something easy, something simple here in Houston.

That backyard tree was a testament to the sturdy sort of certainty I had stumbled into. The simple but supremely satisfying life that was suddenly mine.

There are photos and a video I rewatch with scenes of a giggling, big-cheeked child twirling round and round in the swing, clutching an Elmo and Grover doll. She is delirious with happiness over such a simple thing.

And every time I caught a glimpse of the swing in the backyard, usually while folding laundry — the never-ending laundry of a family that added another child and dog (with another on the way) — I would feel the same delirious joy bubble up inside. I would feel her smile on my cheeks, a grin almost painful to bear.

I worried the tree would have to go. At one point the neighbors who lived in one of those two-story rebuilds had to trim some of its limbs back. Then the forest in the unused alley behind our house was hacked down by another neighbor wanting access to their own construction.

The lush canopy of green that once sheltered us had been dwindled down to just our lone backyard tree. Branches fell here and there, including several sizable ones in the May derecho. We’d need to get it inspected, I figured.

Now we just need to get it removed, leaving a hole in the backyard where my eyes will eventually rest as a I fold onesies and burp cloths.

We are all OK and that’s what matters, I’ll think. But every storm, I’ll hold my breath and hope we can say the same.