16 November 2007

I Think That I Shall Never See...

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
-- Joyce Kilmer


But it only takes one person with a little chainsaw to wreck a tree. If you look at this photo <- you will see that Neighbors have a lovely maple tree in the rear of their yard (the one in the middle of the photo.)
Now I grew up in a maple forest and know from personal experience that they grow to be 50-60 feet tall. I don't think Neighbor knows that, or is in some other way opposed to tall trees. Every year I see him out in the yard with a little saw-on-a-stick pruning his maple tree. This year he decided that the tree was just too tall for him to prune in that way anymore. So he got a chainsaw and did this. -> (Click on photos to make them larger so you can truly appreciate the malfeasance here.) At first we thought that he just disassembling the tree from the top down, but when Husband went out to throw a couple of errant branches over the fence he told us that, no, he was done trimming. I am glad that Neighbor's name is not Vlad, otherwise I would think that he had plans on the horizon that may spoil the view from my kitchen even more. Perhaps the water on that side of the fence has some sort of strange pathogen in it, as the people in the house to the right of Neighbor have been known to trim their shrubs with a chainsaw also. They very kindly did it a just above fence height so we could see the mangled branches sticking up over the fence.


I have not knit in the last day or two, so I have nothing to show in that department. Perhaps just some stash today?

2 comments:

Five Ferns Fibreholic said...

What was he thinking? He didn't prune the tree. Pruning a tree is something done with careful calculations. What this guy did was hack away at a poor innocent plant. He dosen't deserve to own a chainsaw. If the tree looks like a dog's breakfast next summer, he'll only have himself to blame.

THUD...this is me jumping off my soapbox.

MadMad said...

Oh, dear God! And if he's going to "prune" the maple, couldn't he at least have waited until after it was done looking pretty for the fall? Dear Lord, what an idiot!