I’d been hunting for a hatchet, or axe, or pole saw, when I spied the hack saw.
“This will have to do” I thought, getting ready to spend the next hour or more chopping down the silver maple that I’d let grow for too many years in the northwest corner of my yard. It was a pretty little tree for a few years there, shapely and graceful. But ten years later, it started to shade my raspberries, and it simply had to go.
Had I not been so impatient, so determined to get rid of the tree, and called a professional to eradicate the tree instead, things would have gone very differently. As it turned out, I’m glad I decided to do the dirty job myself.
I began to saw through the eight-inch trunk a few feet above the ground. I got into the rhythm - forward, back, forward, back, forward, back – until my hands were raw and my back sore. I had made only a tiny incision in the bark, when...
…a bird shat on my new sun hat. Now, that hat was precious to me. My neighbor had given it to me on the day she hung the birdhouse I had made her for her 80th birthday. She swore she’d seen a Scarlet Tanager using the birdhouse just the day before this one, but I didn’t believe her. Those birds did not frequent towns, preferring the quiet and tall trees of the forest.
I cursed the dratted avian creature, and began to saw away at the trunk again. It was going to be a long hard day, but I was determined. Today was the day that tree would go.
Another “splatt” on the hat, this time right on the edge of the brim so that a dribble of bird dung landed on the tip of my nose at the exact moment I took a good breath in through the nose. You can imagine where that bird dung went next, right?
I was hot. I was sweating. I was looking at a few hours of sawing ahead of me. I had just inhaled bird doo.
I was not happy.
I stepped back from my task, and reached for my pistol, always at the ready in my hip holster. That bird would die.
The bird, a Scarlet Tanager indeed, began to warble its lovely tune, and I stopped in my tracks, transfixed and dumbfounded. What was that thing doing here? Of course, I could understand this particular bird’s language, it was a magic bird. And it was angry at me for cutting down the tree.
“I slave away all day in your garden, eating those Japanese beetles you hate so much, and this is the thanks I get? YOU CUT DOWN OUR TOWN HOUSE?!”
“Ah HA! You’re probably the critter that has also been eating my raspberries, aren’t you?!” I got off one wild shot, thought better of discharging a gun in village limits, and started back in on violently sawing that tree, my efforts renewed, my strength reinforced by a blinding anger.
At that, the bird began flying circles around my head, its lovely tune turning into a screech that would freeze the blood of a dragon. The circles became tighter and tighter until each beat of his black wings left a tiny flutter on the flesh of my neck. I frantically tried to brush the beast away, swatting myself with the hack saw instead.
Soon, I was in a cloud of birds. All the birds of the neighborhood had come to the Tanager’s aid, and all were screeching a tune I knew very well:
All we are saying, is give peace a chance
I decided to move the raspberries and leave the lovely tree be, a home to many.
Peace came to my back yard.
All beings thrive there now, especially me.
This is my entry to the Hive Garden Community's weekly creative garden challenge, the first such challenge of 2024. Come join us!!!
I just finished watching Billy Jack and The Trial of Billy Jack, lessons in peacefulness both. My story is most definitely influenced by those movies. Billy Jack Goes to Washington is up next! Remember those good old anti-war days of ours? Did they shoot so many of us that our urges for peace died too?
Go ahead and hate your neighbor
go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
you can justify it in the end
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
come the judgement day
On the bloody morning after
one tin soldier rides away