It was a phone call you hate to get at the office from your next-door neighbor.

"Your house is going to be on the TV news tonight," Mary blurted out last week.

Harry called 911. After the police and fire departments left your house, TV reporters kept knocking on our door for interviews."

Just eight hours earlier, I had routinely left my tranquil home for another day at work.

Now Mary was telling me a couple of 75-foot sections of our pine tree broke off during a morning windstorm, flattened our carport, punctured our porch roof, blocked the front door, and slammed into our roof.

What really focused my attention was that 30 minutes before the crash, I had been in my little Civic parked in the now-obliterated carport.

For the TV reporters, the angle was, " Misfortune struck for the second time in less than a month when this besieged home was struck by yet another falling tree."

The film at 11 showed two matching roof tarps on opposite sides of the house.

That's right, this was our second strike. Part of a toppled fir tree pierced our living room ceiling during the big December windstorm.

Emerging from our basement retreat like a wary groundhog on that Dec. 15 morning, I crossed the living room and was happy to see no damage to the deck.

I crossed the living room again and went out the front door where I discovered part of a big fir tree on the roof. I was relieved to see it apparently had only bent the gutter.

So I headed back to the living room and bent down to start up the wood stove.

"Hey, why are there bits of ceiling on the floor?" I asked myself.

A quick glance up revealed a branch pointed down through the ceiling.

I suppose Marge and I could be called "tree huggers." We can hear a tree scream in pain when its branch is pruned.

But our tree friends have turned against us.

In the 16 years we have lived there, we've weathered many bad storms without sustaining much damage. We grew complacent.

During the Inaugural Day windstorm, I sat in that carport listening to President Clinton's speech on the car radio. The power was out and the portable radio batteries were all dead.

But now our trees are giant darts with our roof as the dartboard.

While the trees seem less friendly, Marge and I appreciate our neighbors more.

When the tree hit, we were both at work.

The neighbors didn't know how to reach us. (My personal emergency-preparedness tip: Give your neighbors and family members all your contact numbers.)

That evening, Marge checked our home phone messages as she left work and got the first indication something was amiss. That led to my disturbing phone call with Mary.

While we had been toiled away blissfully ignorant, our next-door neighbor Harry and across-the-street neighbor Pete climbed up on the heavily damaged roof in the pouring rain and put a tarp over the exposed hole.

They also chain-sawed a path to our front door for us.

In a time when commentators lament about the loss of neighborhood connections, Harry and Pete came through for us. We can never thank them enough.

More kudos goes to an anonymous UPS delivery driver.

Harry reports that as he went to put on a raincoat and Pete went to grab his chain saw, a UPS truck pulled up to our driveway.

The driver crawled through the uncleared tangle of trunk and branches and nestled a parcel safely against the front door.

Eric Mathison can be reached at hteditor@robinsonnews.com or 206-388-1855.