come play in my yard

for the last few weeks, chain saws and giggles have been wafting through our neighborhood.
the saws start their unnerving buzz and then incongruously,
there is this rising symphony of laughter and utter glee--
like cicada songs coming in waves floating out
and over us.
and over and over again.
all the live long day.
(a good 8 hour day of hard labor, people)

i am thinking they are
completely lovely, with their big orange monster trucks and t-shirts and talk of line clearing and their mellifluous
saw sing-songs.

dangling from high electrical wires, swinging from trees, ripping out limbs and dropping one liners, dancing from ropes, twirling in the air like gravity is just a thing.
and my god, the laughter.

what is so funny?

I dub them
asplundh’s merry pranksters.

now, i’m a wild thing, all about letting trees do their own tree thing, and against the willy nilly pruning and manicuring of trees in general. unless you’re a bonsai artist or it’s a true tree emergency, i think a tree’s architecture pretty much can’t be improved on. and line clearing is usually just a tragic bloodbath. I am known to have these opinions.

but these men in trees!
serenading the air, their gorgeous spanish-
catatta catatta catatta-
streaming out from the tree tops, filling our airspace with rhythm,

and it settles over us

like a protective bubble of joy and soul .

so by the time they knock on our door, our trees are not safe with me because
I have totally fallen in love with these guys.
sure! take ‘em all out!
trees are stupid!
let’s clear cut this piece of real estate!

our bamboo has to come down.
it’s about 50+ feet, straight up.

how’re they gonna do that?
turns out they’re
Brilliant Engineers with Whole Tree Chippers,
Bamboo Balladeers,
Kick Ass Tree Climbing Wood Chip Chucklers,
Saw Totin' Mariachis
is what they are.

did you know that you don't have to be a koala or something to climb bamboo? i didn't.

after the acrobatics and singing and dancing and hi-jinks and true tree ingenuity,
we had some apple pie.

a la mode.

and then they tried to throw each other in the pool.