About two weeks ago we lost a dear old friend. You can see him standing guard outside of our house, as he’d done for the previous 30 years or more.
I’m talking about our stately and beautiful gumball tree. I was so excited when I moved in to have a gumball tree. I remember them from when I was little. Unfortunately, it kept growing and growing. Steve would spend hours and hours every week raking the leaves during the fall. It looked like it had even more leaves than ever this year. And then in the spring/summer the gumballs started dropping and they sure hurt to step on in your bare feet. During a couple of our snow/ice/wind storms we’ve lost large limbs off the tree and have been lucky that they landed in the yard and not on the house or cars. So we started talking about having it removed. I felt terrible about it because it was such a gorgeous tree and if there wasn’t anything wrong with it, except being so much work, then was it right to cut it down? But we finally agreed and had it removed. It was a very sad morning, with many tears shed by me. We came to find as the tree was cut up that in fact it did have some issues. Something, we think perhaps a beetle, had been boring into the bark. And many of the large limbs seemed to be rotting from the inside. It would only have been a matter of time before they fell. I didn’t feel quite as bad about cutting it down after these findings. Here is the finished product:
Our house looks a bit bigger and there is definitely more light coming into the living room. I think a lot of the plants and grass in the front yard are grateful to have more sun now. And Steve has agreed to help me plant a few smaller trees and fix up the flower bed in the front. We are thinking some flowering cherry or dogwoods would be nice. We will probably also put an arch there so I can finally have my honeysuckle that I’ve wanted as well as a place to move the clematis if/when we add on to the back of the house and I have to find a new home for it. We will also hopefully put in a new lightpost since the one there is broken after some vandals decided to smash it last Halloween. In the long run, it was the right decision to have the tree removed. It was just a very hard decision to make.