The Silver Lining of Nature's Wrath

The weather has been more than a little crazy, with cool summers, warm autumns, and the occasional storm that seems to come out of nowhere. We got slammed with just such a storm a week or two back, and it was a little precarious, to say the least. We got some rain but the big deal was the wind, which knocked out power to much of the area. We lost it for about 3-4 hours, but some people were without electricity for as long as a week. Boy what a drag.

While we're never fans of big windy storms like that, if there was ever a silver lining to them, this might be it. We had an old hemlock that had died a few years ago but was still standing, so it needed to be dealt with. The big concern was that it would fall somewhere we didn't want it to, though it was too far from the house. My Mentor had a look at it and wanted to cut it down ourselves, which would have entailed tying it to his truck and gradually cutting the thing down. I think we could have done it, but he was insisting that we drop it onto the grass where we hang out laundry, thus necessitating the removal of our laundry line. Not a big deal, but would require putting it back up, and it wasn't that easy because it's long. I thought it would have been easier to drop it in another direction, but he was having none of it.

As with many things in my life, I sat on it and eventually my Mentor went back up to his winter home in Maine, so the tree was still standing, allowing me to put it off for yet another year. Yay... or not. Then this storm hit, and mom had mentioned that she thought she could hear trees falling in the woods. As luck would have it, one of those trees was the dead hemlock, and it fell back safely into the woods. Boy, talk about getting lucky, not only did it do no harm, but it's tucked away in the trees, out of sight and out of mind, sort of. You can see it, but I could probably leave it as it is and nobody would care, or for that matter, even notice. I will probably at some point cut it into blocks to facilitate the decaying process, but for now, we're in good shape. Besides, I've already put my chainsaw in storage, so I have an excuse.

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Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Hoads Wood Cottage for the pic.