Yardwork

I feel the need to share my marvelous stupidity with the world.

I bought my first house in November. It had been foreclosed upon, which means various things (beyond affordability), such as a yard that had not been tended to for quite some time. Shortly after the purchase agreement went through, the lawn care stopped. The purchase agreement itself went into effect in, without checking my records, ah, August or early September. The grass got pretty long. There is a large cottonwood tree in the backyard, and the leaves fell down on top of the long grass. This spring has seen me outside working to rectify years of neglect.

It turns out that the owners of this property really weren't yard people. The mature apple tree, also in the back, was in sore need of trimming (part of which the electric company came along and mowed off last fall with no regard for the proper way to do it). There is a small orchard around the apple tree of suckers that were allowed to grow unchecked, many of which are so large that I'm going to need to pull them out with a chain attached to a pickup truck. I had attempted to trim the tree in the early spring when it's healthiest for the tree, but as that is the extent of my knowledge of how to properly trim, I had a hard time even determining what was dead or alive and so decided to finish at a later date.

The suburban neighborhood that I live in came with many neighbors who do normal suburban things such as mowing their lawns in a timely fashion, and I was the last person on my block to get around to it. Having determined that I could no longer have a scrubby, half dead yard and hold my head up high, I decided that tonight was going to see me breaking out the lawn mower that I recently purchased and getting at least some of my grass chopped down.

This might be a good time to mention that for over a week I have been so tired that I am drunk. Yesterday I almost went home from work sick because my body was crashing so violently. Today I was shaking from exhaustion while just standing still.

After having put my kids to bed, I started to mow. It went fairly well until I got to the hill next to my house. I have a very healthy respect for the damage that a mower can do to a human body since I have seen the toe of a man who had a lawnmower run it over when he lost his step on a hill (*wince and onomatopoeic word of fear and disgust here). The mower got stuck in some soft dirt as I was pushing it uphill, but instead of wisely figuring out how to safely deal with the situation, I pushed harder and harder until it became dislodged. It was alright in the end, but, eh...kind of stupid.

After having mowed the entire lawn and feeling quite pleased with myself for my grown-uppedness with not only owning a house but a lawnmower and having the drive to get the job done, I decided to sit in the backyard and admire my handiwork. It was at this point that I looked at the apple tree and saw how much deadwood there really was in the tree, now visible by contrast to the growth on the rest of it. I went to the garage and took out my pruning shears and pruning saw and proceeded to the tree.

I have no ladders. I priced them a while back but was too stingy to buy one, so I lodged the shears in a crotch in the tree, put the saw firmly between my teeth, and started climbing.

I also have a healthy respect for the dangers of tree trimming, since one of my grandfathers fell while doing it and broke some pretty necessary bones and nearly died.

I had the wonderful idea that I would start from right where I was and prune my way up. I very sensibly lodged myself in ways that would most likely keep me from falling and proceeded to trim. I took off a lot of branches and was feeling pretty good about myself, when I realized that I had pruned some of my safe way back down out of the tree (much like painting oneself into a corner, only twenty to thirty feet up from the ground). I then further realized that I had left my phone inside of the house, and that the only people who knew where I was wouldn't be waking up for about eleven hours and that I might wind up having to spend the night in the tree (it now occurs to me that I could have shouted, but that was lost on me at the moment). Other realizations included that it was now mostly dark and that it was raining.

I kept trimming, largely unconcerned about all of these things. I climbed higher and higher into the tree, and as the branches left it and I had fewer places to lodge myself, my perches got sketchier and sketchier until I got to the point that I was holding myself into the tree with my left hand grasping a flimsy dead branch while my right hand vigorously sawed away.

Eventually I forced myself to throw the saw out of the tree so that I couldn't trim anymore, after which point I proceeded to just grab the branches and wrench them off (did I mention in the dark with rain falling?). I finally began to descend from the tree and noticed how much I missed those dead branches that I'd climbed up. I didn't have any footholds to make my drop to the ground safer, so I just grabbed a (dead) piece of branch that jutted out a hand's width and used that to swing my entire body's weight down and out of the tree.

By the time I was done gathering all of the dead branches into a pile elsewhere, it was too dark to even see what the tree looked like.

No, I didn't actually get hurt. No, this story is not high drama, nor is there any reason for anyone to care about it. But as I sat in my three season porch pretending that there was enough light to admire my work, I couldn't help but think that I needed to share, as I said, my marvelous stupidity.