- My Last Tree Farm Visit Ever?
- or, How I Came to be Blogging Here Instead of Playing Guitar at 5:00 Mass
This year's tree hunting excursion got off to a later than expected start. I should have known that my second meeting would take up the entire morning. Even though the ministry teams' portion of the meeting has allegedly moved to earlier in the agenda, the music ministry needs to be in on the planning discussion for the quarterly gathering, plus we have an all-day healing workshop coming up in February that I'll also be supporting with music. My 10:30 early departure didn't occur until noon, at which time the meeting was still going strong. I needed to come home and eat, and the ladies (my wife and our daughter) couldn't gear up in their layers until we were almost ready to leave because they'd have sweltered. We probably pulled out around 1, with a plan to be back in time for Melissa and I to go to 5:00 Mass. That would give Teri plenty of time to get to her young friend Emily's dance recital at 6.
Our Shih-Poo, Col. Potter, comes along with us each year, and seems to relish some off leash time running around in the fields once we get out away from other tree hunters. Tracking down the right tree is an involved process, requiring a diligent search for the perfect specimen of whichever variety happens to strike our fancy. Scotch pines were always my mom's favorite, but we're more concerned with height and fullness than species. It generally takes us quite a while to find one we can agree on, which to my analysis is most directly dependent on our getting cold, tired, and frustrated enough for our standards to match the quality of the product available. I'm convinced that, by the time we choose our tree each year, we could go back to a half dozen we'd earlier rejected and they would be just as acceptable as the one we end up with. The whole process provides plenty of opportunity for Potter to get in a few longer runs. Since I'm less patient and mostly less picky than my family members, it has become a real plus for me when the weather is cold on the day we're tree hunting, as everyone else seems to make up their mind faster. I've started joking that I'm going to take a book along, sit in the car and read while they pick out a tree. Then they can call my cell phone when they've agreed on one and direct me to them.
The process is complicated by the fact that we're usually looking fairly late in the season. We've been going to this tree farm for a very long time, maybe longer than we've been in our house (18 years?). They've been open for a couple weeks now, but we usually end up buying ours around mid-December, early enough to get a lot of pleasure from it but late enough so we don't feel like we're pushing Advent out of the way too quickly, and so that the needles aren't falling all over the place by the time we take it down, usually around Epiphany. At any rate, because of when we like to buy, a lot of the best trees are already harvested by the time we start looking.
When we got to the farm today and asked where they had which varieties ready to harvest this year, the very friendly associate (well, everyone has always been friendly there) made sure we were aware that there were four rows of half-priced trees in an area they were trying to clear. Since Teri has always wanted a tree downstairs, too, I suggested this might be the year for that if we could find an acceptable specimen among the bargain trees. We agreed that our standards would be lower for this one, that even a "Charlie Brown" variety would be fine. So we took off for the far southerly reaches of the farm, giving Potter some of his off-leash time to bound through an area that was cleared of trees but had quite a bit of tall grass which he had to deal with. He was having a fine time.
It turned out that we found our "second tree" first, and it's no scrawny thing, either. It wasn't tall enough to suit us as our primary tree, but is actually fuller than I wanted for downstairs. The trunk was at the upper limit of what our existing tree stand will accommodate, so sawing this one down sapped me of quite a bit of energy. We loaded it up onto the tree wagon and resumed looking for our main tree.
Every tree we saw was either not tall enough, not full enough, or both. Scotch pine, blue spruce, white pine, Douglas fir; they'd all look fine from the north, but the only ones that passed muster from the south were too short for our taste. I finally found a lovely shaped pine, but it got rejected for height. The thing is, we can live with some barrenness on one side, as long as it doesn't extend too high, as we put our tree in front of our living room window so that the lower part of it is facing a wall. But too short is always a deal breaker; aside from the unwritten-but-generally-accepted family standard, it looks silly in the window.
We'd finally resigned ourselves to traipsing over across the road to the north end of the farm, after rejecting at least a half dozen trees I thought would be fine in our space. I made a snarky comment (or four) about it obviously not being cold enough for tree hunting, or that we clearly hadn't gotten cold enough yet. As we started working our way back, we kept looking at trees along the way, when what to our wondering eyes should appear but an acceptable tree! The problem was, we were going to need another tree wagon to get our two trees back to the main barn and our van.
Now, when I mentioned this dilemma, it was obvious that I would stay and start cutting on our main tree. Fortunately, the trunk was a little smaller than our other tree, though this one was taller. My foolishly unspoken assumption was that one of the two ladies would stay to push against the tree, providing a gap to keep the blade of the bow saw from getting pinched, while the other went back to get another wagon. Next thing I know, both ladies are headed toward the outlying barn, with the dog, in the direction of the main barn. This second barn was probably about a quarter of the way back, and they were definitely too far away for me to call either of them back. So I set to work, eventually getting the width of the saw blade cut all the way around the base of the tree very near the ground. Now, this was my second tree, and my arms were growing considerably tired, plus I had no one providing a push against the tree, so the blade was starting to pinch. I had taken a couple breaks to look back down the path and still didn't see any sign of the ladies or Col. Potter, so I got out my phone to call to check on them. No answer on the first of their cell phones. No answer on the second cell phone. Finally, as I'm composing a text message, my phone rings.
It seems that a couple of things transpired. First, all the trudging around had both my wife and daughter worn out, the latter of whom was also experiencing pain in her back. More disturbingly, Potter had apparently gotten into an altercation with a loose dog at the main barn. They thought he was probably okay, but weren't sure. So, couldn't I just put the two trees on the one wagon facing opposite directions and pull the both in that way?
Well, seeing as I couldn't seem to finish getting this second tree cut down by myself, I rejected that plan and asked for some help. Very begrudgingly, my wife acquiesced to trudging "all the way back out there, and then all the way back again," and would bring another wagon with her. I went back to work on felling the tree. I'd been trying to push against it myself, and instead of bending where I had been cutting, the stump was moving in the ground. Where I'd been laying to cut it was frozen, but there'd been a bed of needles under the tree and especially around the trunk, and with all the rain we've had I'd been dealing with quite a bit of mud. I finally got a few more strokes of the saw through each side of the trunk, and was able to push the tree over to finish the job of sawing through it. But there was still no sign of the ladies walking toward me, and I was beginning to worry that maybe Potter was more seriously hurt than they'd thought. I thought I'd spotted my wife's baby blue coat a couple times, but the first was on a guy out tree hunting with his family, and the second person stopped by the stone house next to the outlying barn. I tried doubling up the trees as the staff had suggested to her, but they were both just too full for that.
When I called again to check on her, I was scolded for not knowing how far it was out there and for calling again to check on them, and told that they had reached the outlying barn. I soon saw the three of them, our daughter draggin' the wagon toward me, and Teri and the dog walking by the barn and appearing to then go back to the stone house next to it. When our daughter had covered about the remaining distance, moving very slowly because of the pain in her back, I met her and took over the pulling. I loaded the second tree up on the wagon, and told Melissa to start pulling "the lighter one," not realizing the shorter one was actually a little heavier. I pressed on ahead of her with the other tree, intending to get it back to the main barn and then return to help drag the other one back in. That actually went according to plan; I met them about halfway back toward the secondary barn and dragged that tree back in, too, after greeting our dog, who now seemed to be doing fine. He sure was skittish, though, when we got back to the main barn.
By the time I got both trees loaded into the van, it was about 4:15. Meanwhile, my wife had gotten a phone call indicating that the dance recital was from 4:30 to 6, rather than starting at 6 as she'd been told earlier. We rushed home and I got the trees out of the car right away so she could leave, but by the time she parked she was too late to see her young friend dance. There was absolutely no way for me to get the trees into water and get cleaned up for Mass.
On the way home I told her, "You have a year."
"A year for what?" she inquired.
"For me to forget that I've just sworn that I will never do this again."
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