What Now

From the "That's not something that happens everyday" files...

Monday evening after work I was sitting in the livingroom when someone knocked on the door. It kind of scared me because even though I grew up in a place where people just yelled "Knock, Knock" as they walked through the door, I've fallen out of the habit of having people just drop by. I answered the door and there was a strange man on the stoop. He didn't say hello, he didn't ask my name, he just said:

"Do you want to get rid of that dead tree?" and pointed to Wally, the walnut tree that Steve's parent's planted when they got married.

I think my first words were "Bwuh?"

Wally had been leaning on the edge of death for some time now, losing leaves earlier and earlier in the year, and limbs periodically falling off for no good reason. Steve had been talking about getting rid of it, but the logistics of the thing were kind of complicated.

I decided that the man on the porch must have been driving through the neighborhood (he was in a little sub-compact car with his family) and must own a landscaping business and was trying to get a new client. I was just about to tell him to give me a card, because he would have to talk to Steve about it, when Steve pulled up. From there it left my hands and went back to my book. I didn't think anything about it again until I heard a chainsaw and the tree fall over! The man had meant, did we want to get rid of he tree right then! I went to the window, and there lay Wally. Branches everywhere, limbs severed, and an unusual light shining in through he window where the limbs usually block it. Poor Wally. I heard a small sound in the distance. It was if a thousand squirrels suddenly cried out, and then were silenced. ;)

When Steve came in later, we pieced together that the man needed work. He didn't own a business, but he and his family needed money. Hey, at least he was willing to do some work to get the money rather than just asking for it. Gotta love that! He had his wife and kid out there helping him, as well as his brother, so it was down and stacked within an hour. Now we are sans one walnut tree and suddenly our front yard looks enormous! I'm going to miss the tree, though. It's funny how you can get attached to things that you never really think about. We plan to plant another one either where that one was, or near it. Otherwise our yard would look naked!

Yesterday I mowed the lawn, and Steve was picking up the branches left behind from the tree. I was on the riding mower, so once I was finished with the strips to the left and right of the house, all I had to do was wait for Steve to get done picking up in the middle. There were so many (apparently Wally had been extremely frail and brittle) that after a while Steve just gave up and told me to run over them and break them up with the lawnmower, while he took care of edging and whatnot. At first that wasn't a problem, seeing as it was just tiny sticks along the edges, but as I got closer to the middle, the sticks turned into branches and then to limbs. The neighbors, the ones who already think I'm insane, were sitting in their van about to go somewhere. They were watching me run over these limbs. It made me nervous! Also, I didn't want them to see I was basically launching splintered projectiles into their yard, so I went around back and mowed until they left. Then I finished up he front yard. It kind of got bad towards the end, and I think something caught on fire very breifly, but all ended well.

I'm getting a gardner...