-Oh Dear God Will I Ever Catch Up?- tentative working title :)
an excerpt

-Chapter 1-
-Lightening Strikes-

The lightening stuck the 500-year-old oak tree directly in the center, penetrating the heart, just moments after the sun slid over the horizon bathing the forest in the red gold glow of sunrise. The forest fell silent, seeming to hold its breath in anticipation. All around the tree a nearly solid stillness filled the area, trapping all sense of movement or time outside. Even the rain that had begun to fall just moments after the lightening struck seemed to be kept away from the tree as if the tree and several feet of forest floor around it were contained in a bubble.

After a moment of unnatural, frozen silence, the forest took a hesitant, faltering breath, releasing the stored tension back into the atmosphere. The birds began to chirp, filling the spring air with song and hope. The breeze began to blow, sweeping away the staleness. The raindrops began a staccato rhythm as they fell against the leaves of the canopy before gathering together to slide down the veins and drip onto the thick carpet of grass below.

The insidious bubbling, popping, hiss of boiling liquid reaching its highest temperature before becoming a gas and filling the air with moist heat slithered across the forest floor, rising slowly toward a climactic moment of crisis. The concussion of the tree exploding rent the air, ripping any thoughts of normalcy from the five minute old day. Small pieces of shrapnel formed of tree bark, sap and resin from the blast flew through the air barely missing the bird just taking flight after the moment of terrified hesitation that almost cost it its life.

Anyone watching all of this and witnessing the hole that was the only legacy of the 500 years of struggle to maintain strength and stability in the wake of the destruction of the forest by the coming of modern man would have taken it as a portentous omen and quickly returned to the safety of his or her home. There they would spend the rest of the day cowering in fear, wondering what monumental change was going to take place because of the missing strength of the tree whose roots delved so deeply to find nourishment that they were tangled with most of the other trees for nearly a mile.

However, Ashling was at home shooing her cat Zoey off the monitor of her computer for what would be the first of thirteen times that day. She had acres of houses, streets, lamp posts and other signs of normal civilization safely sealing her away from the disaster. Until later she would not understand the importance of shooing Zoey exactly thirteen times, the random bits of mulch that had somehow appeared in her yard or the few moments that the world has seemed to hold its breath in anticipation of a monumental change that began and ended in silence, just as she opened her eyes for the first time that day.