AVON – As Lucille Oliver remembers it, she was sitting in her living room, listening to the five o’clock Lawrence Welk program on the radio when it happened.

“I was sitting here. … All of a sudden, the power went off, and it came like the snap of your fingers, just like a white cotton bedsheet across the window,” Oliver said Monday.

She heard a noise like breaking glass, and when she looked to the window all she could see was pine needles and rain.

Moments later, it was over, she said. It wasn’t until she got up to survey the damage that she saw the trees. At 85, she doesn’t go out often, but she could see the damage easily enough from a window. Thirty-five pine and oak trees had been pulled up by the roots and were lying in a row, all facing in one direction, on her back lawn.

“I knew all the windows was broken,” she said. “But what I heard was the sound of the trees (not the windows).”

“It all happened in very short order – in a split second – and then it cleared right up,” she said.

Her son Herbert Oliver of Waterville surveyed the damage Monday. His mother was lucky none of the trees closer to her house came down, he said.

“I can’t explain what it was,” Lucille Oliver said. “A mini-tornado is what I call it.”

The National Weather Service calls it a micro-burst, hydrometeorological technician James Brown said Monday.

Brown, who works in Gray, said the NWS put out seven thunderstorm warnings for Maine and New Hampshire Saturday, and had already received a number of property damage reports.

“It was an incredible night,” he said. “I saw a rainbow with lightening going through it.”

Herbert Oliver, Lucille’s daughter Evangeline Prescott, and family friend Christal Hall all remarked Monday that the storm was like nothing they had ever seen before. The sky was dark with ominous-looking clouds, but the sun was still shining, giving everything an odd, otherworldly glow. “I’ve never seen such a sky,” Hall said. “It was eerie.”

That phenomenon is quite normal during thunderstorms, Massachusetts NWS meteorologist Bob Thompson said. Unlike winter storms, which can go on for hundreds of miles, thunderstorms can be very small in diameter, so while one part of the sky is covered with clouds, the sun can still be visible. Micro-bursts are also common, he said. They’re formed by strong down-currents, which accelerate rapidly and hit the ground almost like a bucket of water being poured out.

One of the ways meteorologists tell them apart from tornadoes is the fact they move in one direction, instead of in a rotating path, Brown explained. Often, micro-burst winds reach speeds of 58 miles per hour or more, he said.

Oliver was scared when she heard the wind, she said, but the danger she could have been in only hit her after the storm had passed.

Six years ago, when a similar storm uprooted trees on her property, she told her family she wanted three trees close to her house to be cut down. She lost that battle, she said. Saturday’s wind storm uprooted trees behind and next to the three, but they still stand, unscathed, on her back lawn.

She expects she’ll get her way this fall, when her grandson comes to remove the downed trees. But she’s not sure.

“You can’t win for losing, can you?” she asked laughing.