Tuesday, July 17, 2007

We Have Weak Trees





Just before we bought the house, we watched The Money Pit. Yesterday, I was reminded of the scence where Tom Hanks stabs a tree with a knife to carve out some initials. The tree suddenly falls to the ground, erupting in a domino effect of a dozen more trees just falling over. He goes inside and tells whatsername (you know, Diane from Cheers), "We have weak trees."

I opened the curtain in front of Lulu's cage as always so Shawn's stupid bird can get some sunlight we toil away at work. After I opened the curtain I just turned and left the room. When I re-entered the living room, my eye caught the window. I dumbly stopped dead in my tracks and stared at the window. Instead of our front lawn or the street, all I saw was tree. Leaves and branches and just, well, tree.

"What are you looking at?" Shawn asked. Sigh. A very large branch had sometime in the night fallen onto Shawn's truck.

Why is this funny? Because he trimmed the trees only about a week ago. And here a very large portion of tree dangled on Shawn's truck.

So I wne tto work for a few minuets and then back home. I got Shawn and we went to his work so we could pick up his saw, then back to the house. Shawn, always afraid that I'll somehow manage to get hurt, ordered me to stay out of the way while he attempted to trim a small bit of branch away from the truck. I remained on the porch, eye balling the area where the branch was still connected to the tree and made sure it remained there as Shawn sawed. The usual walkers were not out this morning and I at least had to make sure someone (me) was around to call 911 in case the whole things came down on Shawn.

Shawn finished trimming away from his truck, got inside and gunned it down our modest drive way. We expected in theory, that once Shawn had moved his truck out from under the branch, it would come tumbling down like an avalanche. No such luck.

It took about another hour to get the whole thing down. Funny, huh? All that time I watched the branch vibrate and shake and listening to it crack as Shawn trimmed away chunks here and there and held on tight until there was nothing left to trim off. With the weight shifted to the wrong side of the thick branch, Shawn twisted it for the 478th time and it finally cracked and fell to the ground.

Yeah, that's how Monday's go around here.

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