A sweet gum tree has made a couple of past appearances in this blog. Calling this tree sweet in any way is misleading. A few years ago the top of it fell on my head. You can relive my account of that incident here, if you are bored on this rainy afternoon. It has been dying for quite awhile. It needs to be taken down.
The problem is that it is located about ten feet from the power line that allows me to cook and stay warm and watch TV and use the Internet. . . and it grew leaning toward the line. I have a chain saw, but I could not figure any way, given my limited lumberjack expertise and its previous effort to kill me, to cut the tree down without depriving myself of electricity, and possibly giving it another chance to finish me off.
So I let it be for the past few years. It continued to die, its demise being accelerated by the evil poison ivy vines that choke it. As you regular readers know, poison ivy is part of the axis of evil that has invaded my yard against which I have an ongoing battle, and is normally by enemy. But, sometimes, as the ancient Arabic and Chinese proverb says, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As I walked out of the house this morning the driveway was almost blocked. The top portion of the rotting tree lie in a broken heap, tangled with poison ivy. The weakened, decayed trunk that remains is considerably shorter, and I believe I can take it the rest of the way down without hitting the power line or allowing it to break off and bash my skull again.
There have been many times in the last few years that I hoped and prayed that since we were suffering storms full of straight line winds and tornadoes that the tree would be taken down by these otherwise unwelcome forces. But a dying tree has few leaves and branches to catch the power of the winds. So there were many times that, while looking at the fallen trunk of a beautiful hickory or oak with its sprawling branches full of lush green leaves lying in the edge of the woods, I cursed silently the ugly sweet gum tree, still standing, taunting me. There was no justice.
The tree rotted from the inside out, it grew weaker and weaker, its bark and wood dying, turning into a mealy mush. It was not high powerful winds that finally took the tree down. Last night, in the final stroke, it was the torrential rain. Without a canopy of leaves for protection, the rotten, dead remains of the tree soaked up the water like a sponge. Eventually the added weight proved too much for the tree, and it fell into the heap that appeared on my driveway this morning.
So, I'll have to put on my hazmat suit to avoid the massive poison oak vines, and clean up the driveway. Water-soaked dead gum wood is heavy. And poison oak vines large enough to support a tire swing could be lethal to me. But I don't care. The sweet gum tree, though not completely defeated, is now manageable.
It's strange isn't it? Had the tree been alive, had the bark and wood remained strong and not decayed, it would have been strengthened by the rain. But in its state of decay and death, the same rain caused its collapse.
I think its strange how the scripture and various proverbs say that it rains on the just and the unjust as if rain were necessarily a bad thing.
Rain is rain. The question is us.
Whether we are living or dying.
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