Timber

I’m sure there is an easier way to do things, but so far we haven’t found it.  What we lack in planning, we make up with in perseverance.  We spent a lot of the last two days watching the ‘boys’ play lumber jack.  We had an 85 foot spruce tree that needed to be taken down and let me tell you this sucker was tall!  Ever since we mentioned this to the first-born son and his brother-in-law-to-be, they’ve been consistently asking when they were going to ‘get’ to bring it down.  Corey arrived with a small used electric chain saw, I thought it was a ‘girl-saw’ and thanked him for the present.  I then made my first mistake, I went to Fred Myer (of course) for more food and mole bombs.  I have a hunch that as my car turned out of sight my two men hatched their tree taking down plan, actually I don’t think they really had a ‘plan’, they probably just looked at each other and said, “She’s gone, let’s take it down”.

I came home to find tree limbs strewn about the lawn, my husband saying everything was ‘fine’ and  my son 60 feet up in the tree with my “girl-saw’.  Clearly he’d had no intention of bringing that saw here for me.  I quickly asked the other women (his fiance and his mother-in-law-to-be) if they’d told him to ‘be careful’, because we all know that some how saying it out loud will hopefully make it so.  I was assured that they had, but they were praying none-the-less.

I’m not sure how many trips up the tree he went, but it was a lot!  The ‘plan’ was to take the tree down in thirds.  The cutting went well, until the saw got stuck, in the tree 70 feet up.  Time to bring in the tractor to pull the top 15 feet down, then  a trip to the store for stronger rope, then a lot of knot tying and a lot of rope breaking.  Day two saw reinforcements arrive when the brother-in-law-to-be learned we really were in the process of taking that sucker down.  The three men discussed how to get it down now that the job was a bit butchered up, climbed the tree, drove the tractor and snapped a lot of rope.  As it was hot, the rest of us watched them from the porch swing, calmly playing with the kittens and praying no one got hurt.

Eventually the top third came down!  Timber!  Which brought new enthusiasm for the ‘plan’.  More saw cutting, more pulling, more tree not budging…. the boys needed to leave.  The job half done somehow resurrected my girlish tree climbing skills.  So with Pat telling me to ‘be careful’, up the tree I went.  Who knew at 53 that I’d literally be up a tree.  All the youthful muscles gone, Pat and I still managed to get the second portion down.  With sawdust down my back, spruce needles stuck in my bra and sap in my hair, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of proud of myself for getting the job done.