Timmmm-berrrr!

Damon started the new year by cutting down a tree. The first day back from our California trip he opted to stay home from work to take out a fir tree in the front yard.  It's dropping needles and he had decided that it was blocking sun and stealing moisture from the lawn, so it had to go.

My husband is many things. He's an engineer, a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician. He's very handy. But I would not call him a lumberjack.  We don't own a chainsaw. Damon's idea of cutting down this tree was to climb part of the way up, saw into the trunk, tie a rope around it, and then climb down and yank. Damon's also very MacGyver.

So, that's what he did. We tried to get the action on video but were having difficulties with the memory disk on the video camera and didn't realize it in time. Damon went out on the driveway and pulled on the rope until the top of the tree came crashing down. This is pretty much how he cut down another [dying] tree in our yard a few years ago, except that time he used a garden hose instead of a rope. I told you he was MacGyver.

Once the top of the tree was cut off and tangled amidst the lower branches, Damon climbed back up and took his tiny saw to all the branches he could reach. Can you see him peeking out there?

He eventually got things cleared away enough so that we had a giant mess of limbs and branches covering the lawn and a splintered 10-foot-tall trunk pointing straight up into the sky.

The best part of all this was the kids' response when they came home from school. Gunnar came in from preschool and said, "Bad, Daddy!" Adah and Maggie were equally upset ("Daaaaad-yyyyyy!! Why did you cut down that tree?!") and lamented the loss of the tree; they were just appalled that their father would do such a thing. It was pretty funny. We're not sure what their attachment was to the tree. I think it was just that he dared do something so monumental without consulting him.

Adah, Queen of the Branch Pile

I thought it was ironic that he cut down the tree to save the lawn and here he was smothering it, but it just took a few days to find someone with a chainsaw who wanted some wood (we don't have a fireplace) and could help us out the next Saturday.

Enter a real lumberjack. Not really. He's actually one of our local physicians, but he could wield a chainsaw and felled that tree right where he intended. No one got hurt, including the house and cars. I was happy.

Then Damon took a turn at cutting the trunk into manageable sizes while all of the kids (including our friend's two) helped load the useable firewood into their truck and all the branches for bonfire burning (at another friend's house) into our truck.

 

It's nice to live in a place so abundant in chainsaws.  We actually probably had about half a dozen options. Damon just wishes we didn't live in city limits so we could have our own bonfire with the branches. Too bad. I just wish we had a fireplace so that we could have cozied up with all the firewood ourselves...especially about two weeks later when the snow and ice arrived. . . stay tuned.