(with apologies to Kesha and Pitbull)
I was at work on Friday and happened to check my gmail. I saw that an amazon package had been delivered the day before, but I’d forgotten to check my mail that day. I was a little uncomfortable leaving it out on the porch two days in a row, so I decided to go home for lunch.
So, at my usual lunch hour, I headed home and went in the backdoor to my house. I popped lunch in the microwave and went out the front door.
To a tree.
Part of the tree in my front yard had come down and was covering the entire sidewalk and up on the porch. There didn’t seem to be any damage to the house, but there was a lot of tree down and it was just – you know – tree.
I retrieved my package from the fortunately unscathed mailbox and went back inside to eat my lunch. When I was done, I called my boss and told him I might be a little late coming back to work since I wanted to at least clear a path.
I tried shoving the biggest branch out of the way and got scraped up a bit. So, I went and got my handsaw from the garage and set to work.
My neighbor came home after I’d been working for a while and came over. He asked if this was on purpose and I shook my head and said it was very much not.
He offered to loan me an electric chainsaw and a pole saw and I graciously accepted. It took me about an hour to get the path cleared, but that was just moving things off to the side and working with the handsaw. Rather than fire up the chainsaw, I put a pin in that and changed my shirt before heading back to work.
On Saturday morning, I was back at it and used some clippers to cut the twigs into pieces that would fit in my garbage can. Then the handsaw on the medium sized pieces.
Then the chainsaw.
I was very careful and the only thing that got cut was the branches. While I was working on those, my neighbor came over and topped off the oil and said that another of my neighbors would take the wood.
I kept at until I had all the branches in a manageable pile. I returned the saw and called it a day. When I went outside later, I found that the neighbor had taken all the wood and the medium sized branches. The only clean up to do was to rake the grass and sweep.
Today, I tried to used the pole saw to clean up the tree a bit, but realized that it was cracked much further down. It’s not going to make it and I’m going to need to get it taken down.
Which is a bummer. This really pretty tree was one of the selling points to my house and I’m going to miss the shade.
And the green view outside my windows.