A taste of home, I wondered?
“See how the cord is tangled in the growth here?” (Looking back up at me.) “You need to set up a frame of something to hold up the lights, not on the tree.”
“Yes.” And then the older guy wanted to know, re the tree, “Where did you buy it?”
A neighbor over thataway was having tree work done too and the younger guy and one of theirs apparently recognized each other and stopped to say hi across the fence in what was clearly a happy moment.
And then they got down to work.
There was a volunteer juniper bush, not very big yet but I was clearly not a fan–the guy motioned through the window at me and held a section upward, questioning? Yes?
Yes!
Alright! One whack of the chainsaw and it was gone and good riddance to the prickly little beast.
Except, with everything else out of the way we could finally get a good view of it and that really left nothing but trunk and a bit of froth and I didn’t see how it could survive–it had been near dead as it was.
Chris the boss man happened to stop by right as they got to that point, in just the most perfect timing; “How much to just finish it off?” I asked.
“A hundred fifty.”
I called Richard. Alright then. Out with it.
They cleaned up the job site, Chris having already gone on to the next, and that was that. The stump grinders will come later.
I never, ever, would have thought we could get that much sun in that part of the yard. Never. It has always been in dark shadow. But the afternoon sun was reflecting so brightly off the now-bare fence that my eyes complained. (But then, I’d spent too much time outside–I’m just glad it wasn’t June.)
We’ll have to plant something right away to fix that. Now that I know it’s got direct sun from 2:00 to sundown, and I’ll watch tomorrow to see how many more hours it will be, we have a whole lot more possibilities than we’d thought. Pomegranates, mandarins, a fig kept very small… We’ll see. They could easily grow there, and I never would have thought.
A squirrel perched on the empty fence line, staring, demanding that his personal escalators reappear, darnit.
All in good time, little guy, all in good time.