Living the high life
When the farmer and I threw in our lots together, I knew things were going to be different around here. Muddy work boots by the kitchen door spring to mind. And so do the tools.
The farmer is also a carpenter, and the combination of the two requires saws and sprayers and digging implements. Our garage is full of things that cut and measure and hoist and plant. I own devices that measure the precise wetness of soil.
But all those tools are mere trinkets compared to the ultimate gadget, the one that arrived here last week, attached to the back of the farmer’s truck.
He’d rented a cherry picker lift.
The winter had been hard on our many trees, and there were dead branches everywhere. Never one to pay others to do the things that allow him to rent or buy a tool with which to do it himself, the farmer waited for the next dry day, pulled the lift into the yard, and climbed aboard.
He brought my son into the project for support. It took them the better part of two hours getting the lift in place and secured, time I spent pacing nervously and begging my son to remain on the ground and to wear his hard hat.
I have a fear of heights and also a tendency to try to micro-manage, a combination of neuroses that I’ll admit did nothing to enhance the farmer’s work that day.
Both men suggested I go into the house and let them be. I left the premises altogether and drove off to the grocery store. As I left, the farmer was harnessing himself to the lift and my son was at the wheel ready to send him up into the tree.
That’s where the farmer was when I returned a hour later, high up in the branches of the pin oak in our front yard. I had to crane my neck and shade my eyes to see him. It gave me vertigo.
I yelled up for him to be careful and don’t reach too far because that’s how people fall out. But the buzz saw was noisy and the farmer didn’t hear. Not that he was listening anyway.
By then the yard was littered with dead branches. I’d hear a snap and then watch another limb come crashing down. I looked up and gave the farmer a thumbs up. He lifted his saw in a show of mighty manhood.
“It would have cost fifteen-hundred to have someone come in and do that,” the farmer said when he was back on the ground. “We did it for two hundred.”
That’s what it cost to rent the lift for half a day. Plus a few bucks for the hard hat for my son.
As I turned away to pick up branches, my son climbed into the lift. He wanted to take a ride before they returned it to the rental place. I objected, of course. He harnessed himself in, the farmer pushed the button and up he went.
He waved at me.
“Both hands on the railing,” I yelled back up to him.
He ignored me, of course. Men love their gadgets, and he was taking a ride in the best one of them all.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.