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"Mom," asked my 5 year old son, "are they going to come when I'm at school?" His sad, concerned eyes showed that I had better not say that he was going to miss this event.
"I don't know, honey. We don't really know when they'll show up."
"...But why can't they tell us?"
If he only knew he was asking one of the great, unanswerable questions of life!
"That's just the way it works, we don't get to know when the workers will actually make it." I took him to school, and told him that the odds were in his favor that they would not show up first thing in the morning.
This particular tree has been problematic. It's just outside our property line, so it's not technically ours, but it keeps dropping hefty branches in our yard.
Oh, and it's in the way of the only view of the lake from the house. And it looks kinda creepy. The result is usually this conversation: "Ooh, there's a nice sunset tonight!" Click. "Heh, we need to see if the HOA can take that tree down."
Click.
Click.
Click.
So I was really excited when ownership of the tree was established and the HOA dealt with any legalities and set up it's removal.
Lucky for my Kindergartner, the tree cutter-downers didn't knock on the door until ten minutes before I picked him up from school.
"Mom!" He cried out from the window that he had plastered his nose to by the time I got his little brother out of the car. "There's a man in the tree!!"
I was wondering how they were going to take the thing down. Most of my experience with cutting down trees has been of the small, DIY sort. This was new to me. Sadly, the rest of my concept of how it works came from an episode of Mighty Machines about loggers. Sigh.
Joining my son at the window I saw that there was, indeed, a man in the tree. I had assumed that they would cut the tree down at the base and then chop it up into little bits with a swarm of chain saws. But apparently, that is not how it's done. The actual procedure is much more precise, and produces much less collateral damage. (I had a crazy dream about the workers coming to our house in military vehicles, creating a swath of destruction along the fence line down to the dead tree. It was apocalyptic. Way more collateral damage! And there was a tornado. And my husband was sent home from the station half way through his shift, after being exposed to some sort of environmental toxin. But I digress...)
The daunting task is actually taken care of one branch at a time.
The guy in the tree carefully adjusts his harnesses and ropes and ties off each branch before he saws it off.
The team at the bottom controls the chunks of tree as they fall to the ground, guiding the pieces through the live branches to spare them.
For the most part.
The boys set up their trucks and transformers in the window sill to fully appreciate the event.
Finally, after several hours, the tree was down.
The workers kindly chopped up a huge pile of fire wood for us, and left the larger logs on the other side of the fence should we want to keep those as well.
My daughter missed the fun but carefully assessed the situation when she got home. She approves. So do I. The view from the window is much less Halloween-y, and I no longer have to worry about those branches falling off.
For the record, the boys lost interest less than half way through the tree removal. I guess they were hoping for the military vehicle swath of destruction approach!
