I cut down a tree in our backyard this weekend. Or, more accurately, I cut lots of gigantic heavy branches off a tree armed only with a woodsaw (not unlike the ones you get for precocious toddlers), and dodged quickly out of the way as the limbs crashed earthward. Somehow, I managed to avoid crippling injury.
This is a black pine that a landscaper planted about ten years ago, when we had our back yard redone, taking it from a nightmarish jungle that probably housed at least one tribe of tiny devil-men into an alarmingly well-groomed paradise. (It has since reverted to just kind of unkempt and dead, but I took lots of pictures of it when it was just done so I have the proof.) He planted the tree and assured us that it would get to be "no more than ten or twelve feet". Of course it is now closer to twenty feet and now represents everything our neighbor resents about us, as it stretches into their yard, threatening their electrical wires and casting a lightless pallor over their once-beautiful hydrangea.
What I want to say is that I have grown as a person, because even though I formed a cunning plan for how to fell a twenty-foot tall pine tree without maiming myself, I recognized that it was fairly likely I would end up maimed in this scenario and chose not to do it.
This represents a significant step forward.
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