If Amy falls while stacking wood, will anyone hear her swear?

Our big, magnificent maple came down last week. Oh...how I loved that tree and mourned its tragic loss. Without fail, it surprised me each Spring as it heralded the arrival of a new season by slowly unfurling its translucently delicate green scrolls. My first glimpse of Fall would be burrowed in its branches. My children defied gravity in that tree. Squirrels scampered. Birds twittered. And, in the end, I cried.

Its mangled corpse lay littered in my lawn. In life, the tree book-marked the segue into each passing season. Now we were to bear witness to the reversal in this final season of death and decay. Little did I know that I would act as a pallbearer to a two-ton tree.

My husband is a man-of-action. We would not be sitting Shiva for our fallen friend. "Would you like to begin at 5:30 am, after our Sunday morning fritter run, or in the evening?" he asked me. Begin what? I wondered...I could not be-leaf what he was asking me to do! Bad enough that I witnessed the demise...now he wants me to be part of the embalming and burial process as well! "Evening," I said immediately, noting that he employed the teacher trick of offering choices that DID NOT include a loop-hole for refusal. Having accepted our offer to take the wood, I prayed that my neighbors would arrive well before that time.

It was not to be. We enjoyed our fritter, lamenting the lack of shade in our now empty back yard. Brushing the last crumb away, Brad leaped from his chair and began outlining his plan. I tried to reason with him to no avail. "I will not let my grass die without a fight," he declared with the righteous dignity of Nathan Hale. I was quickly assigned a job. "But Erin just did my nails," I objected. He admired them as he stuffed my hands into work gloves.

"Let me get this straight," I grumbled, "You want me to move this pile of cut wood over here to make another pile of cut wood?" I recited a long drawn-out version of the Greek myth about Sisyphus, keeping one eye out for activity from across the road. Surely my neighbors were going to arrive with trumpets blaring at any minute. I once lay prone in my snow-filled lawn, dramatically clutching a shovel to my body like funeral flowers until Jerry came over with the skid-loader and plowed my driveway. I eyed up my toppled tree and wondered how long I could lay under it before Jerry would feel compelled to rescue me.

After he enjoyed my story, Brad set me to work stacking wood. S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G  W-O-O-D. Let's just say that I NEVER win at Jenga...how on earth do people make neatly-arranged configurations of firewood? Brad was busy with the chainsaw so I was free to say every swear word in my repertoire as loudly as I wanted. Eventually I ran out of breath. Dripping with sweat, I was soon coated in sawdust, my skin stinging from the airborne nettles from the nearby field of wild parsley. "You were the one who asked Jerry not to cut it," Brad told me. "The field was full of fireflies," I cried, "I didn't know that it was full of Devil's Snare as well." I began singing "Wild Parsley" to the tune of a Rolling Stones song as I added to my precarious pile. Brad, fearing for our dachshund's life, shoo-ed her away from my self-created tower of terror. When my flaming face evolved from a rosy glow to an alarming shade of forest fire red, Brad called it a day. Sitting me down, he showed me the established Zones of Completion that we would tackle over the next several sessions. I began praying in earnest. I cursed my lack of foresight. I have lived next door to these people for a quarter of a century. How have we never gotten around to developing some sort of Bat signal?

The next day brought a wheel barrow. This could NOT be good. I looked at it in confusion. I knew a LOT about wheel barrows as I teach simple machines in the 4th grade. Simple machines were designed to make tasks easier. But let us not misunderstand this situation. If I now needed a wheel barrow, that means that my assignment today must be harder than yesterday's.  This added layer to my work load did not inspire confidence.

Oh. The logs were bigger.

But my "muscles" were still the same size.

Okay. Heave the log into the wheel barrow, praying that I wouldn't drop it on my foot. Repeat several times. Stagger like a drunk person as I weave my lopsided simple machine across the driveway to unload and "stack" it on my unstable stockpile.

And then, an intervention from heaven: The chain slipped.

I had already put in discreet (by feigning death on the ground) calls to Iowa, Alaska, and California, seeking help or sanctuary but the travel bans were really limiting any hope of escape. That dangling chain was the most beautiful sight in the whole world. The size 6 font in the instruction manual was further proof that the Lord was on my side in this whole scenario. I hovered nearby, pretending to be helpful as Brad diligently worked to fix the "problem."

Where is a beaver when you need one?  Dam(n). He fixed it. I knew he "wood."

The tree continues to slowly disappear and so does my will to live.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.