Felling Twenty-Six Trees

My husband, bless his heart, wanted to give me a couple of kayaks for my birthday this year and when he asked me if that would be okay, I already knew the answer.

No thank you.  It’s not that I don’t want to kayak although I’ve only tried it once in my life and enjoyed it, but …

I just didn’t feel that we would use them very often since we haven’t been on a kayak in the almost five years since we moved to Minnesota.  We do have access to a lake but, thinking logically, I surmised that once we went out on the lake a couple of times we probably wouldn’t head out to discover what we had already discovered.  hehe

So, I asked for something I knew I would thoroughly enjoy: getting rid of 26 trees. I know that seems like quite a few but in actuality, it wasn’t very many.

This summer, I’ve felt like I’ve been living under a dome of trees. Darkness encompassed me (literally) and made my normally cheery self feel blah.

The small maple and oak trees that were babies when we moved here 4 years ago grew to over 12 feet or more.  I felled a few of the smaller ones using loppers but injured my elbow and shoulder by pressing too hard to get the trees down. Then my brother came over and tried to fell some with his gas saw but it broke and my husband’s electric saw wasn’t strong enough.

To the rescue came our nephew, an Eagle Scout, who felled about 15 of the smaller trees and cleared a lot of brush for us. My husband then took down about five more “smaller” ones.

Still, it was too dark. So my husband agreed to my suggestion of felling 26 trees from large to medium to small (in addition to the ones he and the nephew already took down).

Here’s a picture of the contractor using his equipment to cut large branches off before cutting the trunk.

Here’s a view from afar.  He was pretty high up.

These trunks represent a small portion of what they felled.

We only felled one large dead tree in this area.  Unfortunately the one that is leaning towards our house is not on our property so we didn’t have it felled.  (It’s quite expensive to fell trees …)

Now we can see partial sky in the back of our house.  Unfortunately it faces north so we don’t get sun but plenty of light streams into the family room.

Here’s another view from the back deck looking north.  I can see sky!!!!

It’s amazing how much difference a little light can make in a person’s disposition.  I was so happy I could call myself giddy.

There are about 5 more trees that need to come down.  Next year.  Next year.