The Old Man And The Tree

 I walked out into the back yard at ten thirty. The morning sun was warming, but I put gloves on to handle the tools I would need. A battery powered reciprocating saw, a pry bar, a sledge hammer, and a rope. The acacia stood in the far corner, behind the lemon tree it had been oppressing for lo these many moons. The acacia's top had come down a month earlier, the victim of severe wind and rain that had snapped off the highest four feet. It was now time to bring down the rest of the beast. 

Once upon a time we had taken down a small stand of acacias for the expressed purpose of sharing them with the giraffes at the zoo. A nice man backed a dump truck into our driveway and we loaded it up with limbs and leaves. It was our thought that perhaps we might have that experience once again. My wife called the zoo. They weren't taking any outside foliage. 

And so the acacia continued to grow. Until that tree-topping incident. Now we had a snag that was far more established and root bound than any of the others we had eradicated previously. 

My mind drifted back to those days in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado when I spent summers managing the forest that surrounded our cabin. Pine, spruce, and aspen by the cord. I learned the ways of the chainsaw and ax from my father who we lovingly referred to as Beaver. Now, decades and half a continent removed from those trees I faced my own challenge. In my own back yard. 

My wife was quietly skeptical about my ability to bring ten feet of standing wood down safely between all the other saplings and shrubs that we wanted to keep. I tried not to listen to those doubts as I set to work. I began by cutting a wedge out of the front, nominally facing the direction I had strung a line from the upper branches to a sturdy fence post. It was slow going because the wood was so young and green. When one battery was used up, I swapped for another, returning the dead solider to the charger. When I had gone through all three, I busied myself with the pry bar and sledge hammer. When they had done their work and there still wasn't a battery ready, I went out front to move dirt around for our planter boxes. 

Somewhere in there my wife made me lunch. I went back to work. She went to visit her mother. And somewhere in the late afternoon, after sawing and struggling and pulling and pounding, the acacia gave way. No longer vertical, it left a bright patch of blue in the sky behind where it had once stood. 

I looked at my watch. It was four thirty. Now I had a stump. And a horizontal acacia in need of trimming. 

My dad would have been proud.