If a tree falls in the woods - or in the yard...

Today is the tomorrow I talked about yesterday. Confused?

Remember, you were all witnesses to my plan to definitely up my promotional efforts beginning today. Well, I did do some promoting on the Etsy forums today , and a bit on Twitter. I didn’t exactly knock myself out, though.

Okay, I’ll admit I got a little sidetracked. While on the Etsy forum, I found a new blog roll and, of course, had to stop and read. Yes, I added a few more to my list of blogs to follow. And then there was that posting about some new Twitter folks, so I had to go and look at their profiles and add a few of them, too.

I just felt a bit off all day. Early this morning, a tree fell in our yard. It has been dead for awhile and was at the back of our yard on the edge of the woods. We’ve had plans to take it down for about a year but life got in the way and one thing ran into another and , well, it was still there. It’s actually been dead for a few years. We expected it to come down with the last hurricane that went through this end of the world but it was apparently a lot stronger than we thought.

**I took these pictures from my second story window today while it was raining.

When we first thought about it, the tree was probably 75 to 80 feet tall. I feared it would hit the house or our neighbor’s house if it fell. I figured it would surely take out the fence or the neighbor’s pool. As time went by, the upper branches and limbs simply crumbled and fell, one at a time, landing in the open yard. It had lost a bit of it’s height and The Big Guy assured me it wouldn’t reach the house. He also believed it would simply fall apart as it fell based on the crumbling branches.

Well, it made a fairly quiet exit this morning. It didn’t hit the house, the shed or even my lilac bush. The Big Guy thought he heard something just before he left for work, but didn’t look out there. I didn’t even hear it fall. (Bear in mind, we live very close to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds where the Army tests various weapons and bombs all day. We’re used to loud booms and rumblings that shake the house. Most of the time we simply ignore those noises.)

At some point this morning, I glanced out and saw it in the yard. (It did make quite a dent in the yard!) The smaller limbs did break off and a few did crumble. It seemed to have simply broken right at ground level. It was probably 45 to 50 foot tall at this point.

The Big Guy turned to and began breaking it up as soon as he got home from work this afternoon. He was able to clear up all the smaller branches and pieces that broke off, dragging them deep into the woods. He got out the chainsaw and worked on the trunk for several hours. Turns out the main part of the trunk was pretty sturdy still and a challenge to saw through. He got through about a third of the trunk before he ran out of steam and daylight.

As this was more than I could physically handle, I stayed inside and made him a special dinner. He had worked up quite an appetite with all that extra physical labor. This was normally his nap time! Needless to say, he hit the sack fairly early this evening.

Once all the big stuff has been hauled out of the yard, I’ll set to work cleaning up all the little junk that would really jam the mower. Once we get that all out of the way, we’ll need a load of dirt to fill in the ditch the tree created in the ground when it hit.

It’s funny, I’ve never been real close friends with that tree but I feel like I miss it. (There are plenty more in the woods. I mean, it’s not like it was my only tree.) It’s like I’ve lost an old buddy. Since I worried about it so much over the last few years, I checked on it every time we had a storm or a heavy wind (which has been really frequently this year!)

Now, I’ll have to find something new to worry about out there!