Tree Fall

It was me, the Yard Ape, versus the plum tree. Initial returns suggest that the Yard Ape won.
I know better.
This was the little twig that was battling a stand of bamboo in the corner of our front yard when we moved in. One of the first battles I endured with the flora and fauna of our property was to eliminate the bamboo. Little did I know that this would serve to be my undoing.
A little background: I am not a "plum guy." There is an apocryphal tale about plum jelly that describes my antipathy for this fruit. Rather than repeat it here, I will simply state that I prefer apples and grapes. Plums somehow seemed to have attempted to insinuate themselves somewhere between these two favorites.
I don't care for plums, but somehow I still have to.
That tree has grown some twenty-five feet since it was initially allowed to breathe free. If grapes or apples were falling from its branches, I might welcome such tenacity. Instead, we are inundated each year in June with a yard, sidewalk and neighbor's driveway full of yellow plums. Mirabelle plums if you're keen to know even more. My wife likes them. Not enough to consume them by the bushel. Our dear departed dog Maddie was known to eat a few from the ground, but not enough to come back from the dead to help us clean up.
This year it was all about the beefy limb that had found its way into the phone and electrical cables coming into the neighboring apartment building. This was exacerbated by the sheer weight of the fruit dangling from the branches. The initial harvesting shake of the tree gave us our usual ridiculous amount of of produce, shared somewhat effectively via an email alert my wife sent out.
But there was still the matter of the wires. Once again, my wife's ability to mobilize the community came in handy, as she invited a neighbor down the street to share his thirty foot ladder to help us tame the beast. He came and set his ladder in such a way that I could scamper up and begin trimming with a reciprocating saw. At no time during all these arbor acrobatics did I consider all the ways things could have gone wrong. I just went about my business, disciplining the tree as plums continued to drop as tiny insults to all my endeavors. Cutting into a cable full of electricity. Dropping a branch on me or an passersby, especially the gentleman kind enough to hold his ladder while I hung in the air. Maiming anyone or anything with the power tool I used with one hand while clinging desperately with the other.
And none of those things happened. Instead, I filled a green bin with plum lumber and leaves to be hauled away. And I know that all I am doing is encouraging the beast. Like the anecdote about the cockroaches who will be outliving us in the event of a nuclear war, I hope they like Mirabelle plums.