But the tree is gone - or at least most of it is... LOL... Paul got his chainsaw back from the shop and without any prodding from me the other night, asked if I wanted to 'cut some wood'...
(which really means he cut down the trunk as I cleaned up the small branches, raked, swept up the twigs, etc....) :) Works for me!
I have a pile of sawdust around the base of it the dogs are loving to dig through and Paul's chainsaw is back to the shop for they put on the wrong chain (OMG)... Don't ask me how he managed to get it all down with the wrong chain, but he did!... And there must be 1/4 of a cord of wood piled up for burning later in the fireplace as well!... What a deal!
Paul was up on that huge ladder (the same one we used to paint the outside of the house with) and 'topped' all the large branches off of it until we had just the main trunk left behind... By that point, both of us were already bushed~!!!... That was a LOT of work already... Between his chainsaw and my 'handy-dandy' Black & Decker portable saw, we had already cleaned up all the branches and had a second recycle barrel full of stuff that couldn't easily been burnt!
I love this photo - it's that look of 'Sooo... now what do I do' that I know so well from Paul... LOL... I have seen it hundreds of times in almost 13 years as I've drawn him into some of my projects~!!!...
And I love this photo too... I can just hear Paul saying, "ENOUGH already" - one of his common expressions!... I think (?) by this time he was already annoyed by the number of photos I was taking, but this is recording our own personal history, ya know?
Once he really got after it, the tree was truly dead all the way down through the trunk (so I feel redeemed on my judgment call about the project... WHEW~!!!)... For once one of my hair-brained ideas and projects didn't blow up on my face!
And, by this time of the evening, I had to switch on the camera flash to take a photo... So you can tell just how long it took both of us to get this tree down to the ground and cleaned up...
Yesterday morning, it was a reality check when I went outside for the first time... It truly is like when you first get a new, radical haircut and pass by a mirror accidentially... The visual makes you do a double take and then you realize that you got a haircut, ya know?... The backyard looked a bit naked and exposed to be truthful...
But, I already had another umbrella bought and sitting on the patio table along with the umbrella stand in the floor of my truck, so I was prepared...
A few years ago, the city removed a HUGE tree from the street below and that provided a lot of shade to the back yard along with the shade this apricot tree provided when it was still alive... Between the two of them, we never had a lot of thick grass below and around the apricot tree, but we always had a lot of shade... Once the city tree came down, I immediately noticed how much the back of the house 'baked' in the hot afternoon sun... And as the number of apricot leaves diminished each year, the back yard continued to bake even more...
However, I do love umbrellas... The nice big, wide ones about 7' or more across... I can control the amount of sun an area gets (or not) even if it means keeping tabs on how much wind we have on any given day... I tend to do that anyway because I really try to avoid turning on the AC all the time to keep the bills down... And where the house sits on the side of the ridge, if I am paying attention and opening and closing the right windows, doors, etc. I can get a great breeze moving throughout the house on practically 90% of the time in hot weather...
I tend to take my breaks throughout the day in the backyard - it has become my sanctuary of sorts... Especially as the evening winds down, the dogs engage in a game of 'catch me' and I enjoy this part of my life immensely... My only regret (and it is a VERY small one) is that when I went from the laptop to the desktop computer, I lost the freedom of working out back there... But this is indeed a small price to pay for a huge amount of serenity IMHO...
Anyway, I guess we could be singing, "Ding... dong... the tree is down... The dead tree, the dead tree is down" now... It was an amazing amount of hard work and months of me thinking about this needing to be done... Now to work on getting a thick lawn of great grass to enjoy in its place!
As Always,
The Lady
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1 comment:
My husband finally took down a tree in our front yard! It was rotten and mostly dead and with all of the flooding and odd weather here in NJ I was afraid that it would one day come down on our house. It does look so naked where it used to be. And we're getting way too much sun now baking right into the front windows in the afternoons. I'll just have to keep the shades down for part of the summer days.
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