The time has come to winterize the trees here around the house. Sometimes we get really bad ice storms and need to cut back branches that could possibly break and fall on the house or cars. We picked up some arborist supplies a while back for just this occasion. Sometimes, it is necessary to do this in the spring too.
We get really bad spring storms, with high level, straight line winds. They can knock a full grown tree over in a split second. We tend to be very careful about how tall we allow the trees to grow right next to the house, because of it.