Wherein I Reveal Myself to Be the World's Geekiest Blogger

Spencer called up to me from the garage on Thursday morning, "Mom! Come quick! There's a giant crane!"

Puzzling as to whether he was suddenly a budding ornithologist or construction worker I put on my shoes and joined him in the driveway to see what was indeed a giant crane--of the steel variety--poking up among the trees in the neighboring cul-de-sac.

We followed the stream of kids on bikes to where a house up the street was removing trees from their back yard. However, they weren't doing it the old-fashioned way (where one chops and chops and sweats) they had hired a tree service to come in and do the job for them--and efficient they most definitely were.

The crane had backed up into the home's driveway, lowered the crane over the clusters of lacy birches and suddenly there was a Godzilla-sized tree dangling from the sky. Before our Arbor Society sensibilities could even be aroused, it was lowered to street level to where it was fed trunk first into a waiting tree chipper that greedily devoured it down to the very last leaf. One only hopes that there were no baby birds waiting for mom to come back with a worm.

We stood there, watching, as they pulled up tree after tree--six I think total--and fed them into the chipper with a highly satisfactory grinding and clawing noise that completely fed my dormant and highly unrespectable desire for destruction. It was sad but yet it was something you wanted to cheer--like watching a building being imploded or a car being smashed at the junk yard. Sad to see something so beautiful that took 50 years to create reduced to sawdust in 50 seconds but yet I suppose the homeowners were clearing out the backyard so that it could actually be enjoyed, free of mosquitoes in summer and leaves in autumn. It's hard to use a back yard that is a tree farm and as you can see from the video below it's not as if we're lacking for vegetation around here.

The tree chipper guys smiled at us all grouped around to watch the action. They even stopped to wave and once it was all over we went back home but it was the talk of the dinner table that evening.

P.S. Today is our 18th anniversary. Can you believe we're so old as that?

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