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Saturday, April 05, 2008

work and play

One of our favorite features of this house is the "forest" that surrounds it in one direction. When we were first looking at the property and trying not to love it, that little quarter-acre (if that) of pines, cedars, and a couple of huge and majestic oaks made it very, very difficult. The kids promptly named it the [name of our road] Forest and began planning tree forts and playhouses and who knows what all kinds of imaginative, fanciful kids' play right out of your favorite early-20th-century British children's novel. We love how it shelters the house from view in that direction; we love the shady, quiet secretiveness of it; we love the row of yellow pines that is absolutely perfect for young climbers; we love that our son has already built a treehouse that any boy would love in our favorite tree in it.

So you can understand that to have to hack it up makes us really sad.

Fortunately, we don't have to cut it down (heaven forbid! Did I scare you?); we just have to trim the lower branches on all the trees. The oaks will be fine as they are, but all the pines have branches going all the way down to the ground, and fire-safety regulations require I think six feet between the ground and the bottom limbs. Having sat on the front porch of our rented house during a dry summer night a few years ago, watching a wildfire advance one bullpine-fireball at a time down the hill across the road from me, I can appreciate the need to manage our "forest" with fire safety in mind, especially since it pretty much bumps up against our house, which is, hello, made of 35-year-old wood and also rather expensive. I just don't like it. Maybe once we're done and the whole thing looks all inviting, with the little meadow of green grass in the middle surrounded by dappled shade, I won't mind so much, but I miss the dark secret forest-ness already, and we've only trimmed maybe an eighth of the trees. Not to mention the fact that now I'm going to really have to put curtains on my bedroom window.

There's always a bright side, though: dragging fifty million (or so) tree branches thirty yards up a steepish hill to our burn pile is great aerobic exercise, something I need in a very bad way. And all that exercise means I feel less guilty about my newest Internet hobby:

Scrabulous.

Please, please play it with me. I'm signed up through Facebook, where you can find me if you know my main email address or my full name or if you email me and tell me you want me to add you; I also just signed up at the regular scrabulous.com website with the username rachel74. Scrabulous is like Scrabble except that you can set it up so that you just play as you can, whenever, and you don't have to sit at your computer through an entire game. And also, you don't have to set it up or put it away. And further also, there's a whole world of people who can play it with me, as opposed to just my family who would usually just as soon not. Please? I shall flail you with more italics if you refuse.

Comments

Posted by: Maria at April 5, 2008 11:55 PM

Posted by: Cami at April 8, 2008 04:23 PM

Posted by: jenn at April 11, 2008 12:17 PM

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