The other day, inspired by having finished a shawl, I turned my attention to a boho heart mandala in need of an armature so that it can be hung on a wall.

Today, I had every intention of returning to that specific project to begin the process of attaching the mandala itself to to a crochet covered hoop that is going to serve as the main support, but before I could do that, I needed to run some errands so that I could spend the afternoon working uninterrupted.

And I was on track to exactly that, until I got home.

On the first leg of my errand running, I had gotten about 7 minutes from my home when the skies opened up and there was a deluge of water for the next 5 miles that, while challenging to drive in, soon abated.

I thought nothing of it as I ran the rest of my errands under cloudy gray skies that had changed to blue with sunshine by the time I pulled into the driveway of my home. However, as I made my way into the house, I was confronted by this sight:

Apparently, in my absence, lightning had struck the tree, and left in its wake some interesting debris and a tree in need of removal.

The tree was not the storm’s only casualty. I soon discovered that the router for our internet was unresponsive to my repeated attempts to reset it.

After making sure the outage I was experiencing was not some general outage due to the earlier storm and calling a tree service to schedule removal of the tree, a fair chunk of my uninterrupted time was consigned to history. So I got out something less complicated and closer at hand than the mandala, and finished the last two five-round squares needed for the fourth practically perfect granny square bag:

I know that when August comes and I begin working on my state fair project in earnest, I will miss the shade this tree had so generously provided over the years, and the spot where it once stood will serve as a reminder to me that life can change at any moment in the most unexpected of ways.