In our neighborhood the branches started snapping about 2 a.m. Friday morning. Cracking limbs and the loud thuds of boughs hitting the yard and pavement woke us. Daylight revealed the damage. The top of a tall cedar had broken off and crashed onto one car, which luckily was unscathed. The boughs cushioned the fall. Nearby cars were not spared as a huge maple tree split at the vee, sending one half smashing onto and over a backyard fence–and onto seven cars in the adjoining parking lot. One car’s rear quarter was punctured by a sharp broken branch and another had glass damage. Amazingly, most of the cars came away with minor nicks and bruises. Fifty feet away a thick limb from an ancient cherry tree squashed another section of the back yard fence. Pine boughs were strewn around the yards. In our driveway we had what looked like an evergreen carpet full of shattered glass, with about three inches of pine needles, cones, and spurs of fir all encrusted with ice. Overnight the power had blinked out two or three times, but we were fortunate to have not suffered an outage. At Enterprise Bank’s branch on Gorham Street I spoke to a friend who does our snow-plowing; he was told the power would be out at his house in Lowell until Monday. I heard the same from two landscape company workers who were cutting up downed trees with chainsaws. They were from Hudson, Mass., and had been clearing debris since midnight. They had seen electrical transformers blowing up in a shower of blue sparks as they drove around in the dark. Wires and trees were down everywhere in their area. They had not seen this kind of ice damage since a storm in 1998. I remember a May ice storm in the late 1970s that caused enormous tree damage. The trees were in full leaf, so the ice multiplied the weight on the limbs–the breaking branches sounded like gun shots. When, finally, the sun shone strongly for a while yesterday afternoon, the trees in our yard started raining ice as they shed their crystal shells. The new worry is the freezing weather that will make utility repairs so much more difficult and prevent the needed drying out after all the rain.