Timber

If a tree falls in your backyard and you don’t hear it, does it make a sound?

Apparently, it does. The sound it makes is the sound of money being withdrawn from your savings account!

Last Thursday night, some storms blew through and were strong enough to crack the giant tree behind our garage in half. By some miracle of physics the roughly 1-ton section that broke off landed standing straight up.

It conveniently supported itself by propping up against the branches of another tree, and against the power line that feeds electricity into our lovely home. That triggered a bit of a chain reaction, tightening the electric service line, bending the pipe on our roof and pulling up a few shingles. Miraculously, the power stayed on, and we didn’t hear a thing.

On Friday, we were busy getting ready for our open house. Chelsea even observed a woodpecker practicing on the newly exposed bark, but the section of the tree that fell looked so much like another tree that we didn’t notice what had happened.

Saturday comes along, and Dad notices the problem with the service line on the roof, and we begin to put together what had happened. I call the fine folks at TXU, who promise to come by and get it fixed.

About 12:30 Sunday morning, the TXU guys show up and scare the heck out of us when they knock on our side door. They can’t do anything, they tell us, until we get the tree removed. And we better do it pronto, they say in their most dramatic tones, because if the tree budges, it could pull the electric service from our house, rip a big hole in our roof, and cause death, or even worse. Very helpful, those TXU guys.

I got on the phone after they left and started calling 24-hour tree services, all of whom naturally had their voicemail turned on. After more calling on Sunday, we finally get in touch with a Manesa, a nice man from Sri Lanka with Big Bird Tree Service, who comes out and gives us an estimate to remove the tree. That’ll be $700, he tells us.

Being new to the whole “you own it, you pay to fix it” rule of home ownership, we talk him down in price a little bit and he promises to come out Monday morning with his best crew.

The smart shopper in the family suggests that we get another estimate, so we did, and they came in even higher. Big Bird was our tree service.

They came out Monday morning and the whole thing came down in about an hour. Manesa at Big Bird gave us $100 more off the job since it went so quickly. I promised to tell others about him, so if you ever need a tree service, call Big Bird.

We still have to get our electrician friend/radio talk show host Jeff to come out and fix the service line, but all is a little more back to normal at 2020 Marydale. Until the next storm comes!