Legacy of an Abusive Maple Tree (my woodburnings) and Why Friends Are Better Than Money

I have four pine trees in my back yard; those are all the trees that are legally mine. There is, actually one miserable ashberry tree that came from nowhere, but it doesn't count. All trees are old, ugly and at the same time very attractive in their ugliness. One is growing inside a big porch made actually around it by a previous owner of the house, who was a very handy man. The porch with the tree inside is very impressive, but always full of pine cones. I am lucky to have 8 year old twins as neighbors who come from to time to time and ask my permission to sweep my porch and have all those pine cones. They burn them and enjoy the way pine cones smoke and shoot. Another pine tree is deeper in the back yard and serves as a squirrel feeder. Two other pine trees that look like half bald, crippled creatures, grow on the border line between my land and the neighbors. When I look on those two, my mind gives me Heine's lines:

A pine tree towers lonely

In the north, on a barren height.

He's drowsy; ice and snowdrift

quilt him in covers of white.

He dreams about a palm tree

That, far in the East alone,

Looks down in silent sorrow

From her cliff of blazing stone.

Translated by Aaron Kramer, in: The Poetry of Heinrich Heine, ed. Frederic Ewen (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1969, p. 74).

So, how come that with four evergreen trees I have my yard half-ankle full of brown and yellow leaves every fall, my roof gutters are plugged with fallen leaves, my hands are aching from raking and I am at my wits end every fall until snow covers the ground and at early spring when all this mess appears from under the snow again? Yep, from both sides of my lot there are maple and other trees growing on the neighbors lands, but giving me all the harvest fall after fall. I really don't care about the trees in my back yard area, and seldom bother to rake there at all, because as my late husbands used to say, "lawn mower will do the job". This trick won't pass with the front yard maple tree that bends all over my gravel driveway and hangs one branch above my roof. My neighbor (the "owner" of this maple tree) is a very sweet young lady who doesn't care much about this tree and she even told me once that I can take it down if I desire to. Easy to say, but not so easy to do. The tree bothered me, but spending money on tree cutters bothered me even more. The only nice moment connected with this tree was taking the pictures on a spring sunny afternoon. These are pictures of leaves from last fall in a ditch near the tree; glowing through the waters of the melted snow

I have friends all over the world. I had some friends from Germany for a visit last September. They spent a week in New-York and Chicago and a week at my place. We had so much fun together, traveling around the Wisconsin woods, on the lakes and nature resorts. Evenings we were spending in my back yard around the fire. During one of those wonderful gatherings I told the maple tree story. Evald and Alex laughed at me and said that they would be more than happy to fix my problem by putting the abusive tree down. I was not sure about cutting the entire tree as it was way too big, but I agreed to let them cut at least a huge part of it tilted over my drive way and my roof. The next day my friends borrowed a chain saw from my neighbor and started the mission!

These are the results of mission accomplished! I got my driveway free of leaves, I got fire wood for my outside fire place, I got some wood pieces for my wood burning! Maple tree was hard to polish, that's why I left some of its surface textured which added some authentic accent to the final picture. But when the surface was polished really well, the maple wood was lots of fun to wood burn the picture on, as it felt like I was just shading the pattern with a pencil (this is how I made an Indian Chief and an Indian child pictures).

So, the legacy of an abusive maple tree was worth its being put to a rest. Having friends is much better than having money and this conclusion is made not just because of the tree.

ReuVera's woodburnings© used in this hub CANNOT be used anywhere by anyone else.