Something that many others have not experienced in this day of moving every 5 years, is the evolution of your household.  When I got married (1981) we soon purchased our first house. Never did we think we would still be in that house 30+ years later.  We always thought this would be our started home. When we purchased our place, it was fairly new (the builder lived in it while he built it, so parts of it were 5 years old, parts were brand new).  We are on 5 acres and all 5 acres were open field to the North West. Now, if you know anything about weather, the last thing you want is to be open to the North West!  Our ‘development’ was 40 acres and during heavy snowstorms, gusty fall winds and monstrous thunderstorms we get all their debris. But it’s home! So for the first 5 years, we spent buying bundles and bundles of trees to plant to help build a natural wind break.  This year, we have now reached the end of the live cycles of those trees that we fought so hard to grow those first years. Each year, from now on, we will have to take down 1-2 trees.  It is amazing the difference in the yard with 5 dead trees being taken down can make.  I think our front yard is 20% brighter now – I haven’t decided if that is a good thing or a bad thing – our lawn already would burn out by July.

We built this playground 25+ years ago

And held our breath

What do you do when the 40+ ft tree has decided it doesn’t want to come down?

When something this big, starts to go down, or not in the case of this tree, you just hold your breath until it stops moving (or hangs on to another tree). It took us a couple of hours to get just this one, the biggest of all our trees, down.  Only a few live branches were taken out by all the trees we took down, the playground survived – the slide does have one slight kink in it though, the firepit made it. Now, on to the cleanup.

The left overs