Last fall (long, long ago...when I had just moved out of my house), I became aware that a creature had been busy in my yard. Yes, "busy as a beaver." In fact, it was a beaver. I've never met him (or her, or them) face-to-face, but I've seen their work. I was going to say "handiwork," but of course beavers don't use their hands so much as their teeth. I saw their toothiwork?
I didn't quite know what to do about it. I did call my town's animal control, which is a division (well, one person) of the police department. He told me he didn't trap beavers. All he wanted to know was if the damaged tree was on private property. Once he knew that it was, it was obvious it was my problem, not his.
As time went by, the beaver more or less cleaned up after himself, chewing the log and branches into pieces and dragging them away into the creek. I knew this tree was a goner, because he chewed all around it, so it was bound to die.
Okay, yes. This tree is a pussywillow. A pussywillow destroyed by a beaver. Oh, grow up.
Well, just at the end of December, when I was living with my sister-in-law, we had an ice storm. Branches and trees were breaking and falling down all over the north county, including my back yard.
And by the way, my sister-in-law's house lost power for 46 hours.
Anyway, when it was all said and done, a good number of trees in my back yard had sustained damage or been destroyed. I had to call a tree guy to come out. He was getting lots of calls, but he did meet me—and my sister-in-law, who knows practical questions to ask—out at my place to see what I needed and make an estimate. A week or so later, his crew came out to deal with the mess.
A large pin oak, almost as old as the house, standing right behind it, did not (mercifully) come down, but branches had broken and fallen:
We had the tree guy just prune that tree extensively:
Another pin oak, not ask old or big, but quite large enough, had split and fallen right onto my neighbor's chicken coop:
My neighbor told me that no chickens were harmed, but naturally she and her husband were eager to see my tree removed. So we had that one just taken down:
One next to a shed fell over, root ball and all, so we asked him just to get rid of it:
I'm not sure what kind of tree it was. I have lots of trees because my dad liked to plant trees. He would say, "Old men plant trees, and young men sit under them."
A birch tree by the creek went down:
A neighbor's tree with a double trunk had already been causing me concern by how one side of it leaned toward my garage, so we obtained the neighbor's permission to have that part of the tree removed:
We asked the tree guy just to get rid of the doomed pussywillow:
And I sadly gave the word to take down a Deodora cedar that was not damaged by the storm but had failed to thrive since a neighbor's trees had grown tall enough to block the sun from it:
My dad had liked that tree very much, when it was in its prime.
Have I mentioned we had a lot of rain this winter? When the tree guy's crew came into the yard with their equipment, they left their mark:
The tree guy felt pretty bad about it and said that when the weather was suitable he would come back and try to fix it as much as he could.
So, indoors and out, it's been quite the year for my house. That's my house saga so far. I hope the story has a happy ending.
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