This is no big deal, really, and I wasn't going to mention it, but I'm at the cabin right now, and glancing out the side window, I can see the remains of a tree, handily chopped into segments with a chainsaw, then abandoned. The last time I was here, it was my birthday, and even though I knew my brother was going to be working at the cabin, I came up anyway, because it was 103 degrees at home, and I hadn't been able to come up on my usual day, and just wanted to sit and edit audio and record a story and shoot a couple more Star Wars guy videos. But when I got here, my brother had just finished sanding the big front doors, which are on this spring strung so tightly that it has hit me in the back of the legs and the arse, oh, twenty times or more (sometimes I think about getting your fingers in the way, or my nephew, now seven, getting his little fingers broken by that unnecessarily-dangerous metal door). My brother showed off what he'd done, telling me it had taken him three hours to get it done . . . and there was still the back door to do. Immediately, he handed over the sander, and put me to work. In it for the long haul (after all, this is essentially his cabin, not mine, and I recognize that I'm up there in the one percent Bernie Sanders always bitches about that I have access to it), I put on my headphones and listened to songs as I sanded away all the peeling, sun-bleached paint from a couple of years ago.
At one point, while I was working, I thought I saw a bit of red movement on the other side of the cabin, but didn't hear anything, what with the sander and the music (I am lucky to have downloaded enough songs onto my phone to go running a dozen different nights and never hear the same song twice--except for the first night, you know how that goes). But not too long after, I heard the older man in the cabin next door start up his chainsaw, and go to work on some of the dead trees on his property.* I paused in my sanding when I heard the big cracking sound that signifies that gravity is taking over where sawing left off, and stepped around the side just in time to see a thirty foot tree fall, from the neighbor's property all the way across to ours. And where that tree landed . . . was where I had parked my car an hour before.
My car was not there, however. While I'd been sanding, my brother had gone upstairs, found my keys from beside my laptop, gone down, started it and moved it to the other side of the gravel driveway, then replaced the keys. When I talked to him, he said, "I just had a feeling that tree was not going to go where he wanted it to." And he'd been right. My brother admitted, however, that he'd been more worried that the neighbor's fallen tree would have landed on the big white propane tank on the very edge of our property. That, the man had missed.
Well, it's not much of a blogpost, but I'll admit that it was a pretty kind birthday gift, so I thought I'd say something. And I'll further say that, after my brother went home, the neighbor cut down two more dead trees . . . and one of them indeed landed right onto our big propane tank. Fun.
*This is something we have to do (or rather, my brother has to do it, and I have to stack the wood) every single year. It's not a large property that my dad built his cabin on--maybe half an acre, maybe a quarter--but there are easily a hundred trees on it, in various states of growth. And one of those states is death, my friend . . . something you'll become intimately aware of very soon.
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