Nature’s Nails on Blackboard

posted on Monday

Okay, maybe we can’t blame this entirely on Nature. There is, after all, a barn involved.

A barn that was snugged up against trees, and then which seems to have shifted slightly over the winter. End result? There’s this one stumpy piece of this one branch of this one pinon tree that’s jutted up under the sheet metal roof.

There, it waits for the wind to come from a certain direction, and it commences to SKREE SKREE SKREE SKREE.

If Duncan doesn’t go insane from long-term exposure, I will. At least it’s behind the hay stall and not in his very ears.

Plus, you know…it’s not good for the barn and all that.

The problem is…in order to reach this one piece of this one branch of this one tree, I have to climb, hatchet and saw in hand. Not far, because it’s not the sort of tree you can truly climb at all–just a gnarly clump of juniper and pinon, hard to squeeze into, some of which have trunks that are slightly off true and you can kind of…levitate there.

If you’re careful.

And then the offending branch is still over my head.

Remember my previous post about the hatchet? About how you let the weight of the thing do the work for you?

That doesn’t work so much when the target is OVERHEAD.

Also, wood chips fall in your eyes.

So I’ve gotten out the old tree saw (also older than I am, and in dire need of sharpening) and have a new procedure…a moment of sawing. A moment of chopping. Come back tomorrow.

This could take a while.

But you know, that’s okay. Because if there’s one thing I learned in the process of becoming a writer, it was persistence. Or maybe it’s the other way around…it was persistence that got me here.

Five pages a day. Day after day after day. It adds up to books. Over thirty of them at this point, and if you count the ones I wrote before I was even trying to get published…

So. Half an inch after half an inch after…

And hey! Look what persistence has done with the juniper nursery!