Lumberjacks

Last spring we were living in a townhouse and we had a huge tree in our back yard. I don't know if I could have got my arms around it at the bottom. One day, a crew came by and cut that tree down. They stripped the branches off and cut it down to a short stump - that Daniel would later use as a stage. It left little pieces of wood and saw dust in our lawn for the rest of the season.

Today we are living in a different rented home and our landlord came by and cut down a huge tree from our yard. We're getting a little worried that as we move around this country, trees are getting cut down because of us.

He came by earlier this week and removed one of the big branches that was hanging over the roof. But he did this with an electric circular saw. He was standing on a 12 foot extension ladder - and sometimes sitting on the limb of the tree and cutting through these branches as big as my thigh with a carpenter's tool.

Today he came back with a different saw that looked like a hedge trimmer (again with about 50 ft of extension cord). I thought he was just going to clean up some of the mess he made - limbs half cut, half broken off. But he said he was going to trim it down to the fence line. This tree must be older than him and the fence was built around the trunk. His plan was to cut off the remaining branches, leaving the main trunk 6 or 7 ft tall. There was easily twice as much tree above his demarcation point than below but that didn't stop him.

Daniel and I went out to do some errands and when we came back he had found a gas chainsaw and was going to town on the trunk. He told me that he had underestimated how big this tree was and he couldn't get through the trunk with his saw. He said, "I got pissed at the tree and went home to get my chainsaw. When I got back I told the tree I wasn't bringing out my chainsaw just to cut through that one branch and leave it at the top of the fence so I cut the whole thing down."

Now we have a hole in the fence that's over three feet wide with a stump in the middle of it, branches, wood chips, saw dust, and twigs on the front lawn, in the yard, and a mess on the sidewalk and street. The landlord brought his pickup truck to carry away the wood, but like he said, he totally underestimated both the size and strength of this tree.

He actually attracted the attention of a neighbour who came by and wanted to take the bulk of the wood away. He loaded up a trailer - looked about the size of a horse trailer - with the larger branches and pieces of the trunk, but there was still probably 3 heaping loads of tree parts to cart away in the landlord's trunk.

We love this house and our landlord has been great about fixing things for us and taking care of issues, but it's things like this that make me wonder if he's related to a certain crazy neighbour my parents had that gave us endless hours of amusement watching him out the front window.