First off let me say that blogging consistently without words is boring! So I'm going to start writing again (some of the time) although I am going to keep the comments turned off. It's not that I don't care about anyone else's opinions, or that I don't thoroughly love all of my blog friends who used to read this, it's just that I'm super neurotic and if I imagine anyone reading me I respond by compulsively editing. Long story short I'm much more comfortable writing into thin air and just rambling to myself; my little version of the crazy old bat who putters around mumbling to herself all day. With that image in mind, I'd like to confess that I just spent the last hour walking in circles around yesterday's delivery of firewood. You see, we had our first tree die last week. It was 40 feet tall and probably several hundred years old. Killed by bark beetles, its sudden death worries me that we could loose all of the pines in our beautifully forested yard.Six or seven years ago I misguidedly arranged a community meeting with the Forest Service to discuss their plans for thinning the trees around our little hamlet. Being as we are just about the only tree huggers among this wildly conservative community it did not go well; science was disregarded, and the thinning commenced. At the time we were living in a house snug with radiant heat. About a year later we bought our cabin which is heated entirely by wood. At the forest service meeting the ranger used our local lumberjack's property as an example to illustrate the desired spacing of trees and I seem to recall standing up in front of all hundred or so of our neighbors and pointing at Tom while incredulously demanding "His yard? Have you seen his yard? That's what its going to look like???". The answer was yes. I can only imagine Tom's feelings toward me at that moment but in subsequent months we found ourselves helping his family and it seemed that the meeting was water under the bridge. I have always given Tom kudos for his tolerance of my tree hugging ways and for his magnanimity for saving us from hypothermia by bringing us firewood every year. You see this isn't a very large community and the irony is that without Tom we would have either frozen to death, or would have had to spend our entire winters huddled under the covers while trying to absorb whatever body heat the dogs could muster. We need Tom, and he has never once said anything about my attack on him or his yard. That being said I am beginning to suspect that that night might not have been totally forgotten. The tree that died was suspiciously close to where we stack Tom's wood. He assured me just last week that once he gets to a tree the beetles are long gone from it. Rationally I know that Tom is not intentionally infesting my yard with bark beetles but it does seem a little suspicious that I spent my evening picking 42 of the little buggers out of the wood pile that he dropped off yesterday....... :)
REVISED COUNT: 120!!!
