Like a parenthesis in these days of incredible heat, a thunderstorm ripped through East Tennessee on Thursday. Thousands without power in Knoxville. And here, local angle, a tree was ripped right out of the earth in the little park where I walk Jesse the Dog. It’s big, more than a hundred years old. And it seems such an un-rightness of things to see the underside of a tree, or a dog wandering in the branches.The rope swing Silvia loved lies on the ground.

And how odd to think of all that happened since, say 1912: Prohibition, two wars, Depression, the Beatles, Obama, so very many storms, even tornadoes coming through and it was this storm, not even the worst since we moved here in 2000, this one hour or so of not even such heavy rain which did in the great old tree. I suppose the raindrops had its number, but it’s odd, isn’t it, how suddenly things end?

A recent, now widely circulating article in the Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” details the author’s difficult choice to renounce a brilliant career as the State Department’s director of policy planning to have more time with her family. Read it. It’s reassuring, in a grim way, this validation of basic math: if you have an 16 hour a day job it’s darn difficult to be a super-mom or even an adequate mom. You can hire nannies, but you can’t hire more hours in the day or energy to fill them. Something’s gotta give. Slaughter suggests some options without much conviction. Nothing substantial. How could she? Twenty-four hours stretch just so far.

In 1979, Dustin Hoffman became the sentimental hero in Kramer vs Kramer when he sacrificed the fast-track for fatherhood. Amazing. What a guy. Thirty-three years later, such a plot line would draw scarcely a yawn if the woman were the protagonist. Happens all the time. What’s the big deal?

I don’t have small children but I do have family and friends and try to have some political-social activity. You know that a lot of time spent writing will have its costs. Obviously. You know this as a logical truth, but every time there’s a choice to be made between the page and the XYZ demands of life, it hits me: “Oh, this is what ‘it’s gonna cost you’ means.This too has got to go.” One can be more efficient, delegate, let a lot of things go, sleep less, watch no TV, have no apps, treasure the moment, and so forth. But still, time’s winged chariot . . . I wish I had a snappy conclusion to this blog. Friends are coming to watch the World Cup and I’ve got chapter 13 to think about. Something’s gotta give.

Don’t look at the photograph now. Just believe me. When I was in middle school we lived in this house on Minisink Way in Westfield, N.J. The house was on top of a huge, steep hill. Here’s the proof: we gave directions to “the gray house [it was gray then] on top of a hill.” And people found us. More proof. The hill was too steep to plant grass. We had ivy which my father weeded. He didn’t use ropes and pulleys only because he was so sure-footed and determined. And the snow days! Kids came from miles around (ok, houses around) to go zooming down the hill, their lives protected only by the semi-vigilance of a lookout stationed at the bottom, mostly busy making snowballs to pelt the descenders.

Our driveway (don’t look at that picture yet either) was correspondingly steep. Proof: one winter it was too iced for car traffic and my father couldn’t shovel because he was laid up with a knee injury caused by showing off on my stilts (another blog). So my Uncle Arthur couldn’t come for New Years because aged, lame, tiny (well-named) Great-Aunt Minnie couldn’t walk up the hill. See? And also: after walking a mile and half from Roosevelt JHS, carrying my books (bikes weren’t cool then), it nearly killed me to scale those last yards up the driveway and collapse in the kitchen, spraying books around and demanding a snack.

Then this spring we visited a friend in New York and Gary who by chance had moved from London to Westfield (that happens). To humor me, we did a drive-by of Minisink Way and what happened? Now you can look. The hill is not notable at all. It’s sort of mundane. The only thing my sister and I can figure is that people lifted up the house and while it was suspended, with huge machines they scooped off the top of the hill (as for mountain top removal coal mining) and then gently set the house down on the resulting hummock. There is absolutely no other explanation for this mystery.

P.S. The blue spruce was very small, but I know how it got big.