Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Just Say No to Rusty Tourniquets

Not only will this be our first spring in the Midwest, it will also be our first spring owning any sort of land whatsoever.  So like good little children, we are reading the manual (Being A Grown-up for Dummies) and doing our best to get it all done- one of the "it"s being pruning our trees, which have been sorely neglected...nay- abused- for all the years leading up to this one.

Every day we learn more about our land and discover new, weird ways that its previous owners mistreated it.  Today's lesson: a live tree is not the same thing as a fence post.  Urgh!  This is the kind of stuff that makes me so mad.  This and no insulation in the kitchen walls.  Here is what once was or could-have-been a gorgeous elm (or maybe cottonwood...what the heck do I know about trees?  Answer: nothing) which at some point long ago was sentenced to life as a fence-post.  That means they nailed the mesh fencing right to a real, live growing tree, and it was forced to grow in all manner of strange, unhealthy ways and in so doing also ruined the fence.  That, my friends, is what we call a lose-lose

Tommy cut the fencing off today so we would stop injuring our children so often, but you can still see pieces protruding from where they were first fastened years ago, pieces that can never be removed.  So I decided to follow the fence line and see if they had stunted the growth of any of our otherwise-beautiful trees.....

Mmmmmhmmmm....
 And yeeeeeessss.......
 And uhuuuuuuhhhhh....
 And again, with the wrapping of the barbed wire around the tree so that eventually it acts as a sort of rusty tourniquet...
 This one is my favorite (and by "favorite" I mean "least favorite")- what with the wire going directly through the center of this enormous tree...
 and poking out the other side. 
Oh, and look what I found...another one!
 And another....
And yes, still more.

I tell ya what, it is a crying shame that those goobers ruined my trees back when they were their trees and I didn't know I would ever even have trees.  People should, like, take care of stuff, ya know? (How's that for an inspirational quote of the day?  You're welcome!)

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