The people in my community are very lucky this week. For some of them it may not seem that way, because they have horrible destruction to their homes and property and have lost trees and other things. But in light of just how much damage was done, with no injuries reported in the mix, we are lucky.

My house and property was not in the path of Tuesday morning’s tornado touchdown in the Ararat-Longhill community, but it isn’t far away from it as the crow flies. And we did lose power for seven hours, forcing the use of a generator to plug up the chest freezer and refrigerator so months of produced baby milk wouldn’t be unusable.

While I didn’t join the masses of people I heard were touring around the damaged area Tuesday in the daylight to see what happened, I got reports from family members who went in that direction to check on property there and to help out friends who needed to get trees removed from their homes or yards.

My husband talked about how trees had just been plowed down in mass, which I’ve seen before in my observation of tornadoes in Winston-Salem and Mayodan growing up. I guess in this area it just doesn’t happen quite as often, which also makes us lucky.

The times I’ve seen the aftermath of the powerful storms, it has looked like pictures I’ve seen of war zones where buildings were damaged with some in crumbles, and trees had been toppled from the root balls or broken off and twisted just hanging from the trunks.

So while it may seem strange to say people were lucky Tuesday morning, I think we were all lucky because no one was hurt, despite the property damage. Property can be fixed. Trees can be replanted.

Wendy Byerly Wood is the associate editor of The Mount Airy News. She can be reached at wbyerly-wood@mtairynews.com or 719-1923.