Stumped

It only took ten years to make it happen...

The linden tree as the removal service began work early Friday morning

Friday A and I had the linden tree cut down. It was a beautiful tree in many ways.  A tremendous annoyance in every other.

Waaayyyyyyy up there with a chain saw

Back when we moved here and built our house attached to my parent's house my mom would not allow the tree to be cut down.  "It's beautiful."  "The house will look so bare at that end."  "Just trim it some."

This guy really knew his stuff

Well, all that may be so, but A and I got real tired of the bugs that, along with my mother, loved the linden tree.  Spiders, bees, winter moths and ants.  The spiders and ants particularly bothered me.  For many months my truck, which was parked beneath the tree, would be covered, inside and out, with spiders and ants.  Mostly the spiders gave me problems as they bite.  Nothing like driving down Nugent Stretch, at night, trying to squish spiders on the inside of the windshield as I drove.  They came inside the house, too.  I think the ants taught them how to do that.  The bees arrived when the tree was in bloom.  They would buzz all around, high on each branch...and then crawl around on my truck trying to lap up the sweet sap that would drip down.  Oh yeah...that sap was a real hassle, too.  For a month or two the truck would look sugar coated.  A hates the winter moths.  Don't ask me why, but at age 30 she is deathly afraid of moths.  It was hard getting home from work after dark and seeing thousands of the white-winged things crawling up the trunk of the tree...and then have to get out of the truck parked right there next to 'em.

Less and less tree

Ten years of whining and complaining to my mom combined with her forgetting that she had said not to cut it down...

Chain saw man back on solid footing

Now its gone and along with it all those pesky problems.  I'm sure we will miss the green of it and the shade of it near the house next summer.  We will love, however, the opportunity to have a better, maybe bigger, vegetable garden.

Me and the stump (Thanks, R, for the photo)

Gone except for the stump.  The tree service's stump grinding machine is in the shop for repairs so they will be back in the next week or so to erase the last reminder of the linden tree.

(I missed some of the action - the main trunk being felled and slamming to the ground.  I had to be at a tuning job.  I got home in time to see it in its fallen position, though, before being sliced up, loaded, and hauled away.)