The afternoon's work

I spent about an hour and  half this afternoon trimming off and cutting up as much as I could of the downed elm bole (it's one of the whole trunks - this was a multi-trunk tree) and stacking it at the curb.



Hard to tell the size (My neighbor's mailbox is maybe 10' away) but it's as tall as I am, and about as long.

Too bad the Theater Department isn't putting on "The Scottish Play" any time soon; I've got the makings of their Burnham Wood right there.



Yes, that's me for scale, and yikes, that's a bad photo of me.

And yeah, I did all that myself. With a folding Japanese hand saw. I admit a lot of the time (even when looking at that picture of me where I cringe at how unfeminine I look) that I hate being a big, burl woman - finding flattering clothes is harder, you feel like you take up too much space, and fat jokes hit particularly painfully - but when something like this happens, and my choice is to beg someone to do it for me, pay someone a lot more money than I might otherwise, or do it myself, maybe being big and burly isn't quite so terrible.

And yeah, I was thinking this afternoon about how maybe I come to this a bit naturally: my French-Canadian ancestors (and, if the pedigree Ancestry served up for my mom is correct, further back, ancestors in the Dordogne Valley of France) were designated on census rolls as forestiers, which is fundamentally "lumberjacks."

And, I don't know, because I don't have anyone in person to cheer me on, sometimes I imagine what fictional characters would say, and since I've been watching a lot of Parks and Recreation I can almost hear Ron Swanson looking at the pile, and saying, "You cut that up yourself with a hand saw? Good woman."

But now I'm sort of tired and it didn't help THAT much with the little bit of sad doldrums I feel. (Usually activity DOES).

But here are some photos from the backyard, now that all the little stuff is cleared away, you can see the full catastrophe*


(*I almost titled the post "The Full Catastrophe" but decided I didn't want to alarm anyone.)





The full bole, at the largest point, is at least a foot and a half in diameter. I suspect I'm going to have to hire someone with a chipper to get rid of it for me because that would be heavy, even cut up.