I called him to see if he wanted to check out a dead tree situation. We spent most of last summer and early fall chopping fallen trees into smaller, more manageable pieces. Well, not actually chopping. He had a little electric chainsaw which we quickly wore out. Since my dad works for free (or an occasional dinner), I wrote him a check and told him to go wild at a hardware store. He returned next time with a $50 electric chainsaw that we are still using.
The tree was definitely dead. It sits by the road — and a telephone wire. No, we wouldn’t get electrocuted if the tree did go the wrong way. Yes, the phone company would be pissed and so would the driver of a car that could get hit, again, only on the off chance the tree didn’t fall in the field instead.
After sawing some lower tree limbs, I decided against it. We’d had a very close call last year with a tree in my back yard. The guy who ended up saving us said I was lucky it didn’t fall through my sliding glass door and hit me in the living room. I didn’t want to embarrass my dad by talking about it much. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bold. Instead, I distracted him with trimming a hedge outside my front window. Wow, I get so much more light now! The job looks amateur, though, and — guess what? — it is. Those straggly branches will grow leaves again soon.
poem
my story had always been that relationships don’t last
for when you divorced my mother, I was only three,
still, here we are, many years later, relating.
