It's been so long since I've posted, I'd better make sure I remember what I'm doing. Things have been moving slowly since New Year's, but that just means I'm surprised to find myself approaching Memorial Day weekend already. I had expected to have made one road trip by this time to check out the Natchez Trace Parkway. But gas prices spiked and I decided to stick closer to home. Then the tornados struck the southeast and I think they may have dropped the Natchez trace Parkway on the other side of Birmingham. I'll do a road trip another time. I expected to at least be able to get out and shoot some bluebonnets again this year, but we've had so little rain I only saw one clump of them and they were white. I don't know what to make of that. . . but life goes on.
The picture above has nothing to do with this post, other than to distract you while I explain that there's no way to really integrate the pictures I took today with the story of today's adventure. So I'll just introduce the story, add a few pictures and captions if they occur to me, then wind it up.
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Karen (and Mom, and Cathie, and Angela, and Ellen) is (are) getting her back yard in order for a nuptial event scheduled to take place after the Fourth of July. We're all looking forward to it and, as long as there's a breeze and it's not unbearably sticky, everything should be terrific. . . the garden, at any rate, will look great.
The one daunting task that had been looming larger and larger as July approached was taken care of today. There was this tree in the corner of Karen's yard, you see, that grew off at an angle and menaced the fences if not actually the neighbors whose property lies beneath its branches. Now, I'm not a tree surgeon but back in "May-retta" I watched a couple of 'em, so I was asked to come up with a tree removal plan. Well, I did, so I got to be supervisor today. We dragged Stephen away from his paintbrushes and handed him a chainsaw and made him the cutter. He's the only one of us that can climb an extension ladder without drawing a crowd of onlookers anticipating a major disaster. (We won't even talk about using a chainsaw on a ladder.) Karen and Cathie tended the extension cord and nylon safety lines we used to cheat mayhem.
When it was all over, the tree was gone, the branches were piled in the driveway ready to be carried off, Stephen was still in one piece, Karen and Cathie were beaming from ear to ear, and my feet never left the ground. A very satisfactory operation.
