Ta-da!! Here it is!! Please read and comment.

Paul Bunyan

It was a day in March that was unnaturally warm for Massachusetts. The outside thermometer read 58 degrees, so it seemed that there should be tiny green buds on the grayish brown bushes and trees. But there weren’t. The sunshine and blue skies were a temporary respite from the normal dank gray winter sky, and a hard winter that wasn’t over yet. We were enjoying the weather, even thinking that it might last. But we should have figured it was too good to be true.

I was in the kitchen, cleaning. It was Saturday and that was the time I had available to do things like housework, grocery shopping, and homework. I had just started graduate school and it was much more time consuming than I thought it would be. But I had made the commitment, and my part-time job earned me an almost full-time income, allowing me some time during the week to work on projects and assignments. I’d caught up on the homework for the following week’s class so my attention now had to turn to the house and laundry, which had been neglected most of the week.

The breakfast plates were in the dishwasher and the pans were clean and put away. I was wiping down the sink and countertops, making a mental grocery list of things we needed, and looking out at our two-acre side yard. The sink, under a bow window, looked directly east and the morning sun had already cleared the room, spreading its warmth on the floor now instead of the ceiling and walls as it had earlier in the morning.

My brother Pete, who was visiting for the week from the Midwest, was outside with my husband. Pete had been looking forward to some snowboarding in the area, since I’d been hyping it up to him that we’d had almost 6 feet of snow. But with the weather warming every day for the past couple of weeks, most of the snow had melted and Pete didn't have much else to do.

Now that that there was another male around, my husband Brian was taking advantage of that fact to get some things done in the yard. He was a paraplegic and couldn’t do some of the projects around the house that required standing up. Brian used arm crutches to get around sometimes instead of his wheelchair, even though he’d been told to only use them when absolutely necessary. He had hand controls in his truck so he could drive. I hardly ever drove it because the steel pole connecting the steering column to the gas and brake pedals got in my way and if you tried to avoid touching them, you more than likely hit the gas or brake when you didn’t mean to.

He worked at home, in a shop we’d set up on the property for him. It had a ramp, heat, plumbing and electrical, a stackable washer and dryer, air conditioning, and every imaginable tool.

There were two tall, thin trees just outside the door of the shop that he’d wanted to remove since before we put the shop in. The trees, although not very large in circumference, were still 15 to 20 feet in height, and were bowing towards the driveway. He was afraid they were going to come down in a storm and hit the electric or cable wires. I’d successfully kept him from taking the trees down, at least before the weather got bad. My argument was that not only had we already taken down over 150 trees off the property (according to him, trees near a house caused shade and dampness, which then made mold grow on or in the house), he was going to need another person to guide the tree as it came down so it wouldn’t hit the house. And I wasn’t interested in helping.

With another male around, Brian believed he would get some support for his counter-argument, because there always was one with Brian. (Typically he and I argued about not only the priority of doing certain things around the house, but how to do them as well.) His theory was that there was no possibility either tree could hit anything since they were such thin trees. “Barely even branches.” As long as they were cut properly, they would fall away from the house and the shop anyway.” You worry too much. Trust me.”

My brother stood there listening to this exchange, with an amused smirk, smoking a menthol.

“Do whatever you want then,” I responded irritably, retreating back into the house, my eyes falling on the lawn tractor, an older Craftsman model we’d purchased for cash, which was sitting a couple of feet off the corner of the front porch. It had been covered with a tarp since November. Just the night before, Brian had taken off the rocks that held the tarp on, folded the tarp on the damp ground and opened up the hood of the tractor. He’d cleaned out the mouse nests. Before it could be started up and used, however, the tractor needed an oil change and new spark plugs. Anyone else might have finished this project first. But the chain saw beckoned and the trees were coming down first.

As I swept the floor in the kitchen, the operation began. Brian leaned up against the back end of his GMC Jimmy, which waited about ten feet from the trees. He wound a chain between the trees, about 3 feet up from the ground. He circled his forearms around his arm crutches and stood up wobbily, to stand next to the tallest tree. Then he tied the end of a thin nylon rope to the midsection of the tree, and pulled the tip of the tree towards him. He motioned to my brother to get him something that was sitting on the front step of his shop. Pete retrieved a metal disk and handed it to him.

Brian then wound the rope around the disk, and tied the other end to the hitch of the car. He handed the keys to the truck to Pete and waved an arm, which I assumed detailed whatever instructions he was giving Pete.

The disk, I then realized, was a pulley. He was going to have Pete drive down the driveway slowly, which would pull the top of the tree down. Brian would then cut the tree with the chainsaw, just above the level of the chain that held both trees steady.

I had a bad feeling. So I deliberately did not watch. I turned my back to the front windows and bit my nails.

The next thing I heard – because the windows were open with the nice weather – was a chainsaw starting up, and Brian yelling “OK, GO!” Then I heard my brother hitting the gas… a bit too hard. He wasn’t trying to, but the hand controls must have been in his way. Then I heard more yelling, and I decided I’d better look out the front window quick, to see if there was going to be an emergency room visit in the immediate future.

What I saw could have been in slow motion, or a bad scene in a film, and it wouldn’t have been any more bizarre to watch. As Brian yelled “No, no!” my brother must have heard, “Go, go!” and he kept tiptoeing the gas pedal, which tightened the nylon rope even further. The now-weakened tree, anchored with chain to its brother, squeaked and cracked. The tension on the rope pulled it off the hitch, through the pulley, snapping the tree like a whip. The tree then flipped exactly 90 degrees, and fell towards the front porch, landing with an unnatural thud, squarely on the edge of the tractor’s open hood, flipping the hood closed as it did so. I screamed.

The deep V in the tractor’s hood was almost comical looking, it was so deep. But that wasn’t the only damage. Fortunately the very tip of the tree ended about a foot off the corner of our brand new front porch, but it took the cable and phone wires down with it. The metal plate that held the wires to the house was now dangling a couple of feet off the siding.

I burst out the front door, calling to the guys to see if they were ok. My brother had parked the truck, leaving the driver door open. He stood next to the truck covering his open mouth, ostensibly to hold in his shocked and wildly amused “I don’t want to laugh but I can’t help it” laugh. My husband had the same look on his face and was trying less hard to keep the laughter in.

I was not laughing.

I turned on my heel and went back into the house to get the phone and the phone book to look up the utility company’s number. I got on the phone with a very nice woman in customer service who could tell I was trying really hard not to go ballistic on her. She did some checking and discovered that there was already a crew on our street doing some tree trimming and utility pole repairs. She said she would dispatch them to our place immediately so they could evaluate the damage and try to fix it. She did let me know that this type of damage was usually not covered in our monthly insurance coverage, since it was something we did and not an issue of bad weather.

I was actually seething, I realized, as I was talking and breathing through my clenched teeth. I don’t think I had ever been that angry before or since.

I grabbed my purse and the keys to the truck and walked out the front door. I stalked over to Pete and Brian, who by this point had tears in their eyes, they were laughing so hard.

With my jaw tight, I told Brian I was going shopping, and that I’d be back in about an hour and a half. “You’d better have this f-ing mess cleaned up by the time I get back, and I mean ALL of it.” I didn’t wait for his response and got into the truck and drove away, squealing the tires at the bottom of the driveway as I turned on to the street.

When I got back, the tree was removed and cut up, the wires were back on the house, and there was an epilogue. Unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do with the tractor hood, at least in the time that I was gone.

The utility workers drove up in their truck, parked it at the end of the driveway, and walked up to Pete and Brian, who were lounging by the shop drinking Coronas.

“So who’s the Paul Bunyan?” asked one of the utility workers. My brother apparently collapsed into giggles then, just about spitting out his beer, as my husband sheepishly raised one hand off his arm crutch.

The utility guy grinned. “We’ll get you fixed up. Just don’t do it again, ok?”

So it's been a month since I "promised" something

Yeah ... that. Just finished up the quarterly newsletter for the WNBA (www.wnba-books.org) and have also started some research on converting print books into ebooks... so I can't say I didn't have the time to write. I've been making time for other things, however. And I have now come up with quite a few more "incidents" to write about, including the many hospital stays of my ex. Wonder how those never made it into the "idea list" yet; I guess I was blocking them :/