In the final hours before Hurricane Charley hit Central Florida, Susan Kairys-Courech went out and talked to her trees.

"You need to hold onto one another," she warned them. And then she thanked them for all they had given her -- for their shade, their beauty, the home they'd provided to the birds and the squirrels, for the air they had faithfully sweetened season after season for their 18 years together.

When dawn finally came, Kairys-Courech, a 53-year-old Chuluota environmental activist and writer, peeked out a window -- and her heart sank. Thirty of her precious oaks and pines were down, felled by the storm.

"I couldn't even cry," she says. "It hurt too much to see them lying there, uprooted. They were my friends."

The loss, she knows, is not merely aesthetic.

----------- Story above from Orlando newspaper ----------

Wow.. I bet she's glad she didn't talk to her house.