Oh, I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay...

Well, at least, I'm okay now.

Tomorrow morning I will wake up with every muscle in my body screaming, "You are too OLD for this! Old. OLD. Old. Middle-aged women on the downhill slope ought not be ought there playing lumberjack all day long!"

Andrew and I were the primary wielders of the chainsaw:
For some reason, I could not get the machine to start for me; it was hard to yank the starter-cord. But Andrew could make the machine work. He also figured out how to put the chain back when I knocked it off, and taught me how to fix the chain too. Impressive, eh?

Here is the poor naked plum tree. It looks pretty pitiful, and even worse in this photo than it looks in real life. You can see what it used to look like when it was full and lush. But the tree was so big that the plums couldn't be reached for harvest. And the tree was too lush, putting more energy into leaves than into fruit. So after years of neglect, it needed some serious pruning. I hope it lives through the trauma. If not, we plant some dwarf fruit trees in its place.
Off to the left, you can see part of the small stack of firewood that was salvaged from the brush pile.

And below we see the pile awaiting the nice man from the township who will be coming through with his chipper/mulcher machine in about five weeks. We have here the two hugely overgrown shrubs from the north end of the house, the top of the cherry tree that was pruned, the top of the plum tree, and the oddly-shaped red pine that Andrew took down a couple of weeks ago. Philip and Maggie did a whole lot of the branch-dragging and yard-raking to clean up the cutting messes the other two of us made.



My souvenir of the day is, well,... uh,... "freckles." After taking such large branches off the plum tree, I got out the aerosol can of pruning sealant. But for one spot, I had put the ladder in the exact wrong place. A downwind spot from where I was spraying. I now have speckled feet, speckled face, speckled neck, and speckled shirt. But my upper arms are a crack-up; I look like a heavily peppered piece o' roast. I done been tarred. (No feathers, though.) After bathing, I still am heavily speckled, but I must be somewhat cleaner since the bottom of the tub looked like it, too, had been well seasoned with ground black pepper!