I stayed home sick from work yesterday. I was suffering from one of those long lingering colds where every morning you feel like hell, by the evening you feel okay, and the following morning you feel like hell again. So I stayed home and slept in, spent much of the day hacking out great gobs of chunky phlegm, spent three hours in the snowy yard using the chainsaw to clear trees which the big snowstorm had brought down, goofed off some, and went to bed early.
And today I feel great, so obviously it worked. Probably on account of the chainsaw.
Using a chainsaw, by the way, is great fun. It's work, but it's also fun. Dragging the crowns and other huge snarls of brush around the yard was not much fun, but the chainsaw part was great.
Sure, I could have had a horrible accident where the chain snapped and removed two or three of my more important limbs, and yes, that thought was present in my mind while I was doing the sawing. But it didn't happen and it's just fun to do so little real work and watch the chain eat through the trees. And anyway I have a wimpy little electric chainsaw, for trees up to 14", so having the chain fly off and strike me like a death adder on crack probably would only have resulted in some sexy scar tissue, or maybe a sexy glass eye.
Yes, I was wearing goggles. Anyway, it didn't happen.
I also used the downed trees as an excuse to clear yet more brush from the yard. There are several places where a series of negligent owners allowed big weedy bushes to grow; when we moved in, the entire yard save only the front lawn was a massive thicket of twelve-foot bushes, vines, and weeds. I cleared most of that out the first year, and now as I come up with good replacement flora I am slowly eradicating the rest of it.
So I cleared out two big trash bushes from the side yard, and have ordered a couple of heirloom plum trees (from Trees of Antiquity) to replace them.
My family has always had an orchard. My parents have twenty or so trees; they live in the country now, but even in the city we had eight or ten fruit trees in the yard. My grandparents had one - which is still there - and of course their parents had one, etc. etc. So I've grown up to regard having a garden, and an orchard, as an important part of life.
The house we're living in now will almost certainly not be a house we live in for very much longer. Nonetheless, I've already put in two apple trees, some grape vines, a bunch of perennial herbs and native flowering bushes, and a fern garden. Now that I've cleared this new space I'll put in the plum trees; not because I'll ever enjoy the plums from them but because it's the right thing to do. A yard should be a living thing, always improving, even if you're only improving it for people you don't know who will live there years from now.
A philosophy the prior owners did not adhere to. No, actually, that's the owners before the prior owners. The people we bought the house from were awesome and did scads of work, vast truckloads of it, but they were only there for two or so years. Before that we had the people who did nothing with the house, not even routine maintenance, so that by the time the just-before-us people moved in, Tarzan had taken up residence in the yard and was busily fighting dinosaurs. And ivy.
Get this: those same people repaired the furnace flue - which pipes out yummy carbon monoxide gas, and had badly rusted out - they repaired it by wrapping it with duct tape. Yes! So until we discovered this, our house had been filling with carbon monoxide! Daily!
So we love them, yes we do. Anyhow, one of the other things the less-than-useless homeowners neglected to do was take down some large oak trees which have been dying for some time now. They occasionally shed large hunks of wood which leave fist-sized divots in the lawn. Well, I finally called up a tree service, who came out and looked at them and promptly informed me that, yes, the trees in question should have been removed years ago. During the Truman administration.
He quoted me $750, $850, and $650 to take down the trees, respectively, which adds up to an annoyingly large number but is, in all honesty, very reasonable for the area. So I went over to speak with my neighbor; one of the trees in question straddles the property line (actually, I'm fairly certain it's on his side of it), and I wanted to split the cost for that tree with him. He's been agitating to have the tree taken down since we moved in.
I walk over and he, almost gleefully, shows me the big dent in his car caused by said tree dropping a large limb onto it, during the aforementioned snowstorm.
So I've faxed in the completed contract and those trees are all coming out. It's a bit sad to cut down large trees, but when lethally large bits of lumber are coming down out of them, well, you have to draw a line.
Plus now I get to plant some new trees where they were.
- Sun Ra