Ruby Tuesday and Tragic Tree Tale Continued

Maryt/The Teach over at Work of the Poet has something called Ruby Tuesday which features red. I hope nobody minds if I combine Ruby Tuesday with an update on the tragedy of Mother Nature's fit of pique last weekend. One of my beautiful pine trees was struck by lightning and pretty much split in half. I was very lucky that it fell relatively benignly across my back yard, didn't catch fire and did no harm to anyone or anything other than one of my other bushes. I'm praying very hard that the remaining half will survive. It's getting reiki at least twice a day and lots of fervent wishing on my part. Removing it would cost the equivalent of of about 1/11th of my total yearly stipend, so financially it would be a disaster, but if it dies I'll have to take it down as it would become a threat to my neighbor's pool and work shed. Above and beyond all that, though, I love that tree and I hope very much that it will survive.

Here is a before/after shot. You can click on it to see a larger version.

This is the scar from the lightning strike....


I'm very lucky that one of my neighbors is cleaning it up for me. He works for a lumber yard so he borrowed the boss's saw. He didn't ask for any money but I gave him a little bit and will try to give him more over the course of the summer. It's a HUGE job. This is only about 1/3rd of the trunk portion after he sawed it into pieces. The branches alone - with a few pieces of log - filled two pick-up trucks.


The Town of Hancock is great in many ways. If you call them, they will drop a pick-up truck like this one and leave it overnight to be filled up. So far we (well Shawn, my neighbor) has filled up two trucks and he and I both estimate that it will take three more at least.

Notice that the truck has these big red lights... part of my Ruby Tuesday offering this week.

One up side of the tree tragedy is that birds seem to be drawn to the corpse. My yard has had a pair of cardinals and a host of other birds who are now hanging out in great numbers by the chopped up trunk and branches. I wish they would come a little closer... or that my camera had a 15x zoom instead of ten... Still, I'm enjoying watching them and getting even these sort of fuzzy pictures of them. Besides being beautiful, Mr. Cardinal here is part two of my Ruby Tuesday offering.


Have a lovely Tuesday.