I came home from grocery shopping today and was astounded to see our old sugar maple tree in the back yard split in half. We have lived in our house for seventeen years, and nothing like this had ever happened before. When removing the limbs we found that the limb that had been sheared away by the high winds had been wired to the tree. That is remarkable, because it must have happened before we moved here in 1991. All that time and it withstood the fury of mother nature.