I should not be doing this! It’s almost a quarter to twelve on Monday night and I should be in bed already. It figures, but over the weekend I had so much time on my hands (Saturday, at least), and though I got some pieces out, I didn’t get what I could have done. I’ve been writing feverishly for about four hours now with few breaks and my mind is just full of ideas. What stinks is that I have little time to write and by the time I even get to some of them, they will be no longer new….it sucks!
Chopping Down Trees
On Sunday, my friends Rich and Bobby came by to help me with a task I first told you about awhile ago, to cut two trees down in my yard. I was well rested from not doing anything on Saturday and so I was ready to get the job done. The two of them came over about 12:30 and we got right down to business…the first tree was down in a flash! It was the tree that had been leaning on my neighbor’s fence since Irene back in August, the one I couldn’t get down myself, but with three of us on it, it was quite easy, though right after that was when the trouble started.
“Are we gonna take this one down?” Rich asked after we had trounced the first one. It was an evergreen that had been standing not two feet from the first one. It was also kind of old and kind of in the way, but I hadn’t ever thought of taking it down before.
“Why not?” I answered, and we got down to working on that one, and it would have been easy too if it weren’t for the wisteria. Wisteria is a beautiful, flowering vine that spreads like wildfire. It blooms only for about a week in May and I’ve always loved it. However, its vines spread all over the place and become tree-like in thickness and strength, and my wisteria had grown so entangled in other trees that you couldn’t even tell where its vines went.
Bobby began to cut the evergreen at the base as Rich and I held on, he to a rope we had tied to the top and me to one of the vines that was entangled in its branches. Within five minutes, the tree was severed at the base, but it didn’t fall down. Nope, the tree hung there by a wisteria vine that had grown through it and on to another tree in my neighbor’s yard. It was a tricky thing, to say the least!
For the next hour or so, Bobby, Rich and I slowly and methodically worked our way through the evergreen from the bottom up, cutting off pieces at a time until we were left with just the uppermost portions just dangling in mid-air. Bobby went home and retrieved a saw thingy from home that kind of looked like a sickle on a long stick. After a couple of missed cuts, we finally found the one vine that had been holding the thing up and it came crashing down.
A Big Mess
Once we had finished getting down the troubled evergreen, we took down the other tree in the front of the house and once again Rich made a suggestion. He said that while we were at it, we may as well cut down this huge, precarious branch from another tree that was hanging over the street…a disaster waiting to happen. I looked up at the huge thing and agreed. Rich got up on the ladder with the chainsaw to begin working on the thick limb, all the while Bobby and I kept our eyes out for passing traffic, me a little nervous for an unfortunate incident.
Right about the time Rich got to the point where he was almost done, the chain became dislodged from the chainsaw. At least he had cut through enough to where all he had to do was tug at the branch and it, too, came crashing down. Out came the hacksaws and we quickly got the 20-foot limb to the side of the road.
At that point, it was around 2:30 and I thanked the two of them for the help and took a look around at the huge mess that now had to be cleaned. I was grateful to them for helping me…Lord knows what it would have cost me to pay someone to do it, and at the same time the loss of the chainsaw really sucked as far as the cleanup was concerned. I spent the rest of the daylight hours doing what I could…chopping leaved-branches off the larger ones, sweeping the driveway and tying limbs together to be taken away. There is still plenty to do, and like everything else in life, time is short.
So I spent the day feeling sore…my back aches and my arms hurt. I tried working out, but I had to stop myself from fear of doing anymore damage to my body. I will get it done one of these days. There’s a giant tree laying across my front yard and another on my driveway in the back, not to mention the 20 footer at the roadside. Ugh! Does anybody know how to fix a chainsaw, lol?
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