'It's Like a Death in the Family'

"It was the ideal," Bennett said, "although Mother Nature doesn't care one way or another."

It is puzzling to ponder how nature struck Pepe's farm the afternoon of June 4. Thirty minutes after the howling wind and blinding rain passed the farm, Pepe hopped onto his John Deere Gator to survey the damage. That's when he saw Flora's Oak on her side, and yet the two Adirondack chairs at the tree's base had not moved.

"It was like going into the battlefield, the shock of seeing something you can't believe you're seeing," said Pepe, 74, a retired real estate agent who served in the Marine Corps.

"I was screaming, 'God, why? God, don't make it so.' But there it was," said Pepe, a New York native and the son of Italian immigrants.

"It's like a death in the family," lamented his wife, Linda, 63, who struggled to fight back tears.

The tree is named in the memory of Victor's younger sister, Flora, who died at 54 of pancreatic cancer and is buried a few yards across the field.

The Pepes visit their fallen tree with Buttercup, their cocker spaniel. For once, they can touch and explore the tree's branches, which always had been too high to reach.

"On her side, she creates a magical world," Linda Pepe said. "She invites you to explore all her branches. It's amazing."

They thought about the history this tree has lived, long before the Pepes bought the farm 17 years ago.

"This tree sheltered Native Americans; she sheltered Civil War soldiers," Linda Pepe said. "It's fascinating."

The day after the Wye Oak fell, thousands of pilgrims visited the tree in a public ritual that became a sort of state funeral. The tree's branches were sawed into pieces to mill several handcrafted prizes, most notably a 300-pound desk of swirling groves for the Maryland governor's office. Other pieces were made into gavels, dolls and church crosses.

But the Pepes do not wish the same fate upon their beloved Flora's Oak.

"She will never be touched," Victor Pepe said. "When your great-great-grandchildren are walking the Earth, she will be laying here peacefully, just as she fell.

"Just as God left her . . . for eternity."