Sunday, December 9, 2012

The sky is falling! Oh wait, that was just a tree.

The other day it got really windy and nasty out. Kind of like a blizzard, but with rain instead of snow. It was one of those days that makes you glad to be warm and cozy inside and thankful to have a warm cozy inside to be in.

The next morning, we got a phone call. Turns out a tree in the back yard was damaged by the wind. A massive branch snapped mostly off a big cedar pine and hit the branch of another tree on the way down, breaking it too, and ending up in a big tangled heap over the fence and in a farmer's field. Thankfully it didn't hit a house or person or anything particularly damageable, but it seems like the neighbor (who may or may not actually have anything to do with this field besides also living beside it) took it personally and was very insistent it be taken care of immediately. So today I learned when not to ask about neighborly tiffs, and that sawing through a tree trunk is a lot more difficult to actually do than to watch being done while standing around trying to look helpful. Shocking, I know.

I also made friends with a dog who was just loving the abundance of branches being thrown around. He picked up the end of a particularly long and muddy one and tried to convince me to play with him by winding slowly around my legs like a cat. This had the side effect of smearing my jeans very thoroughly with mud. Had it been butter, I would be convinced the dog was preparing to eat me.

Once all the branches were sawed through and heaped into a massive pile (that would have made a highly dangerous but incredibly impressive bonfire), I observed the muddy, churned up section of the field. Impossibly, beautifully, it still had little spears of bright, beautiful green poking up from the mucky sludge. I find it extraordinary that such a delicate little bit of life is able to survive a storm that blows down half a tree taller than a house, a storm that would possibly have killed me if I had stood out in it all night and all day.

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