Out on a limb
Note: Keep those guesses coming for the quiz! Results will be posted either late Tuesday or early Wednesday!
Our front yard has two big ash trees in it. When we bought the house, I paid little attention to them because they weren’t pine trees and I wouldn’t have to deal with pine needles all over the yard, so therefore, they were fine.
After two years in the house, it has slowly become apparent that the trees are not fine. They are scraggly; full of dead, sharpened-to-a-point branches that hang dangerously close to eye level and enjoy getting snarled in hair, hooded sweatshirts, and I can only assume from past close calls, retinas.
They are the last to get their leaves and the first to drop them. Every morning in the spring begins with an anxious evaluation of leaf production. I become convinced that the trees are dead and whiningly share these opinions with Jason. I daydream about replacing them with exotic, flowering Japanese shrubs or lush apple trees or nice maples.
One day, weeks after every other tree in the city proudly showcases its chlorophyll-laden bounty, our trees have leaves. Mostly on the lower branches. Naturally.
We debate whether or not to have them trimmed. We are convinced that once the lower live branches are removed and the frightening amount of dead wood is gone, we’ll be left with two giant toothpicks in our yard.
We delay and postpone and procrastinate some more. Meanwhile, the squirrels are having the time of their lives, dropping piles of dead branches and leaves on the ground for me to pick up nightly, only to stand up and be skewered in the forehead by a dead branch, its knobby protuberances scratching my face and leaving bits of bark in my hair.
I call tree trimmers for estimates. The first place quotes an arm and a leg, presumably because they have arborists on staff; I imagine them talking gently to the trees while making them chamomile tea and knitting branch warmers. The second place never calls back. Place #3 quotes half the price of Place #1. Since my only concern is that the trees stop looking like crap, I call place #3.
They finish the job while we are out celebrating Jason’s birthday. I am anxious the whole way home, envisioning the neighbors ridiculing our trees, trees that have only two sickly branches hanging from them, like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.
We turn down our street and the sight of our trees shocks me. They looked like shivering sheared lambs, like pink-skin-showing shaved poodles; naked from the ground up until a glorious cover of sun-dappled leaves reveal themselves like a green, leafy halo.
We stand in the street wordlessly, arm in arm, admiring the view of our house (you can see our house now!) and the two freshly trimmed trees that seem a little brighter; a little taller, reaching toward the now-visible clear blue sky.
