DOWN HOME: Procrastination or patience?

Posted: 10/12/07

DOWN HOME:
Procrastination or patience?

Remember the dead section of our favorite maple tree? I told you about it before.

Well, it’s not there anymore.

A recap: The top eight or 10 feet of the center branch of our stately maple tree turned bitter brown and died. A boar squirrel scraped the bark off all the way around the trunk about 20 feet up, sprayed it to mark his turf, and waited for the leaves to die so he could use them to build the nest for his first offspring.

Following the advice of our local “tree doctor,” I sprinkled red fox urine on the trunk. The squirrel, fearing its mortal enemy, decided a few leaves weren’t worth becoming the main ingredient in a fox version of burgoo. So, he stayed away.

But his handiwork remained—a gigantic rust-colored banner of rodent sabotage, a swaying symbol of squirrel vandalism, a fluttering flag of fiendish fecklessness.

Every time I looked into that tree, the blight made me mad. I kept thinking about how much money I’d have to spend to remove the dead parts. At least $150, I figured, maybe much more.

In the afternoons, when I got home from work, I’d walk back there and look into the tree, trying to decide if I thought I could take the damaged area down myself.

If it had been a branch that swayed out, I wouldn’t have worried. Lop it off and let it drop. But this was part of the core trunk. It grew straight up and then branched out. Even if I got a clean cut, I guessed, it might knock me out of the tree as it fell. Or scrape me as it passed. Or both.

Cheapskate that I am, I kept putting off calling the “tree doctor.”

Turns out, I didn’t need to.

Joanna called me while I drove home from work. “Remember the dead section of our favorite maple tree in the backyard?” she asked. Like I could forget. “It fell down. Well, most of it fell down.”

When I got home, the top third of the middle section of the tree lay in the backyard. It just missed crushing the swing Jo’s daddy built.

After dinner, I climbed up in the tree (which the little boy in me loved) and cut down four remaining small branches. Then I cut the big section into smaller pieces and carried it all to the alley. And it didn’t cost me anything.

Now, unless you know what to look for, you’d never realize a squirrel nearly ruined our maple tree. It’s still beautiful, and all of it is green.

This little episode reminded me my timetable isn’t always best. While I won’t go so far as to claim the hand of God knocked down the damaged part of our tree to save me money, I do know that if I had followed my normally compulsive timetable, I would’ve shelled out a lot of cash to pay somebody for a chore I did myself in about an hour.

So, patience is a virtue. And sometimes, even procrastination pays.
–Marv Knox