It might seem silly to bawl out a weather system.
Unless you’re 4 years old and that system tore through your neighborhood park, uprooted its best trees and ripped away the shade that had sheltered your playground for generations.
“I’m sad and mad at you, tornado,” proclaimed Abby Shoemate in what seemed like a perfectly reasonable response to a boneyard of fallen trunks and branches. “Why would anyone do this to my park?”
It was a question on everybody’s minds as the people of Windsor emerged from their basements to assess the wrath on their city.
Their paths led to the center of town where streets have names like Oak, Elm, Locust and Birch. In a farm community without much shade, the tall trees of Windsor Main Park — or Old Park, as some call it — set the place apart.
That’s where the town went to play horseshoes, hunt Easter eggs, hold scout meetings and celebrate the harvest.
Abby made the five-block walk most days with her big sisters to swing beneath the elms.
Howard Doudna, 46, crossed the park as a kid on his way to a schoolhouse that’s now Windsor’s town hall. He would play baseball under the oaks, using a stop sign as home plate.
Damage to his house’s roof and siding pales compared with the devastation to his old stomping ground, he said: “Just seeing the park wiped out is the hardest part of it all.”
Chadd and Jennifer Bryant bought their 1913 bungalow for its view of the park’s tall canopy of trees. Three trucks have now removed giant ashes from their front yard. Many more loads still need to be hauled away.
“It doesn’t look like my park any more. It’s really bizarre to feel lost in your own neighborhood,” Chadd Bryant said.
Down the block on Elm, Janene and John Willey always knew that the columnar spruce towering in their front yard someday would fall.
“We hoped that when it finally did, it would go south,” said Janene, chairwoman of the Windsor Tree Board.
Instead, the twister toppled the spruce northward onto the roof of the bungalow the couple bought so they could stroll Main Park each evening.
John, 64, took a break from chain-sawing to wax philosophic about the downed trees. No new plantings would reach the same height and majesty in his lifetime, he figured.
Joshua Serna prides himself on being the only guy in Windsor who does slackline — a form of tightrope walking using a thin strip of webbing. He walked his line under a canopy of two of Main Park’s cottonwoods.
“It was pretty much the most perfect spot in the whole world,” he said.
So perfect that Serna rented a house directly across from the trees he called his own. He could see them from his bed when he woke each morning.
But when he rose from taking cover in his cellar Thursday, he realized they were gone — one uprooted, and the other snapped in half from the weight of a heavier tree.
“It’s like my paradise just got whipped out of the ground and my heart got whipped with it,” he said as the sun started setting.
The people of Windsor held up their cellphone cameras, snapping the day’s last shots of Main Park’s ruin. A blue spruce had tipped onto the horseshoe court. And a picnic table sat mangled by the trunk of a fallen oak.
Then the neighbors headed home in darkness and enmity for a storm without a name that yanked at their deepest roots and plundered the finest spot in their city.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
