I live in an area where the roads are relatively flat and wide, and the weather is considered overall to be “temperate.” What this means in a Darwinian sense is that our traffic patterns have not yet evolved the necessary characteristics to cope with conditions that provide challenges to the baseline genus and species of driver found in our locality.

Consequently, whenever two (unique and precious) snowflakes find themselves rubbing gently together, the friction from the quantum collision causes a ripple in the space-time continuum which causes the entire area to be blanketed in a fluffy white layer of pure panic.  The streets become clogged, the bottled water and toilet paper disappear from store shelves at speeds that defy everything we understand about physics.  Snowblowers mysteriously become fifty bucks more expensive, yet disappear the same way.  And inevitably, I will discover that in spite of my own defensive grocery stalking, I will have run out of something basic, like soup.

So even if you are a halfway decent driver in the snow (read: not from around here), your best bet is to stay indoors, or keep yourself in the cul-de-sac and do donuts all day, and for the love of Sister Mary Francis, stay the hell off the roads and out of the way of the trucks!  Me…I’m watching out the window as the white death from above falls down and the bluejays puff themselves up with affront because who the hell ordered this snow anyway, when it’s so close to spring.  And for once, I’m with the bluejays.

Okay, so I’m not really a treeslayer–the tree was already dead. And I’m not really the actual slayer–I’m more the manager of slaying whilst Mr. Xandra is the wielder of the chainsaw. Because my halflings immediately cleave to my legs the minute Mommy does something interesting, and I just can’t see Child Welfare looking with a kind eye on a mother attempting to chainsaw a fifty-foot dead ash tree with two children attached to her legs. But did I man the phones with 911 on speed-dial in any case.

Most of our backyard is actually woods, and we’re okay with that–it’s why we picked the lot. Neither I nor Mr. Xandra has fantasies about mowing acres of grass stretching into the sunset like a green sea upon which an investment in a John Deere is required. But we have a little patch of backyard with trees and grass (greener in stripes where the septic leach field runs–at least we’ll never have to guess where our leach lines are), and among those trees are a few who are ready to contribute to the next generation of new growth.

So in the course of cleaning up the backyard to make ready for the treehouse that Mr. Xandra my darling children so richly deserve and so badly desire, we knew we had to remove a forked Ash tree that, while still pretty hale, was nevertheless dead, and bound to fall at some point in the future. And tall enough to hit the house if it fell in the wrong direction. So it was in our best interests–and those of my sunroom, where I’m typing this blog entry now, to make sure the tree fell in the not-wrong direction (i.e., any direction away from the house, thankyouverymuch). Therefore…out goes the Mister, chainsaw in hand.

I follow, phone in hand and the numbers “9″ and “1″ already dialed, my finger hovering over the last “1,” and my other hand restraining two half-chunks literally hopping up and down with excitement (or bloodlust at the idea that in a few short moments, Daddy may be severing a limb). I hear the growl of 2.0 liter and the maniacal laughter of Man In His Element (whatever else it may be, it involves destruction and power tools).

The tree consists of a fork, the cleft of which is about two feet above the ground, so in reality, this single about to become deadfall is two trees, joined at the trunk. Had the tree been alive, we would have stretched a length of elastic sheeting between the two forks and proceeded to pick off the low-flying aircraft in whose landing path our house stands, as they cruise towards the runway of our microscopic county airport. But alas, the prongs are as dead as doornails and wouldn’t support more than one round of jetez la vache with slingshot.

As Mr. Xandra starts in on the first fork (maniacal laughter and screaming chainblade both revolving at about 1600 rpm), the chips begin to fly. I notice that he’s cutting out the wedge (just like the internetz told us to), but not making the angles connect on this side. A few minutes more of us yelling at each other over chainsaw and children renders the problematic connection made, and he starts in on the other side, pausing as the tree teeters on a finger’s-width of intact wood. “Who wants to yell ‘timber!’ ” he cries.

Immediately, the children yell, “Timber!” because this is great fun for them.

Nothing happens. So Mr. Xandra walks around the tree right in front of the wedge-cutout (the rule is that wherever you cut the wedge, that’s the direction the tree is supposed to fall). For a split-second, I can see the future, and it is not a pretty future. It involves a permanently cross-eyed husband, at the most hopeful.

But that damn tree mocks me. It ain’t goin’ anywhere. Only after a mad rain of full-body blows (Mr. Xandra is not a small man) does the first fork take a ponderous liking to the laws of gravity and make a graceful, if lumbering (I ask no pardon for the pun, either) fall towards assuming the horizontal. It shatters into four pieces, showing the mold and termite damage of the top. Yeah…glad that one came down before it got blown down…on my house.

Next up, Fork Two. This one leans the other way, so Mr. Xandra begins his Reign of Destruction on the opposite side, creating the wedge, which to me looks more and more like a disaster waiting for an opportunity. “Hey!” I yell in between growls and roars of the chainsaw, “You’re gonna get caught in the fork of the walnut!” Meaning the black walnut tree next to the dead one, whose fork begins about fifteen feet up.

“What?” he yells back and guns the chainsaw again, obviously very interested in my warnings. I ponder changing my name to Cassandra, but I yell again, “You’re gonna catch it in the fork of the walnut! Shift the wedge towards the garden!” I’m accompanying this one with dramatic hand gestures.

“Mommy, you look like you’re water-bending,” says the boy, who watches too many cartoons. I think I look more like a freaked-out wife trying to avoid a trip to the ER. As my kids are well aware, Mommy Doesn’t Want To Spend Another Weekend In The Emergency Room. But the chainsaw buzzes on, and sure enough, as the kids are yelling excited screams of “Timber!” I see the top of the tree tilt, arc, and fall…right into the fork of the walnut.

Silence reigns for a minute, punctuated by the rumbling idle of the chainsaw. “That’s problematic,” says Mr. Xandra.

“Ya think?” sez I.

Again, demonstrating his prowess much like the ancient Minoan bull-leapers, Mr. Xandra darts in front of the Leaning Tower of Hardwood Death–or at least Serious Injury, and he kicks it.

The kick is indeed mighty, but the tree has a mightier girth, and as physics demonstrates, when a round object has pressure exerted on it from a single point at an oblique angle, the typical reaction of said round object is to begin rotation. The tree trunk spun majestically for a brief second, its fulcrum point carrying it off the stump and–you guessed it–right towards the Mister.

There hasn’t yet been a ballet choreographed under the title “Tree Dancing With Man With Chainsaw” but I can tell you, that it was performed that day and executed flawlessly amidst clouds of sawdust spiraling into the air with all the grace that sheer terror of Clubbing By Tree can give a human being that day. Mr. Xandra executed a leap worthy of Baryshnikov, spinning away from the bottom of the trunk, which elected to follow gravity and swing down from the new fulcrum located fifteen feet up in the air, which turned the top of the tree in the opposite direction of where it was supposed to fall, and turning the tree itself into a giant baton that twirled through the air, scraping a gouge out of the ground and crashing through the honeysuckle and other, smaller trees unfortunate enough to not be moving fast enough out of its path before hitting the ground–and bouncing twice before rolling to rest.

Picture if you will, the entire forest–birds, trees, cute little furry animals, bugs, deer, etc. all looking on in frozen astonishment for a brief moment. Picture the stunned family staring at the tree mere inches away from Mr. Xandra’s toes, and the sawdust falling out of his hair the only movement for a moment in time before the top branches of other trees wounded by the log began to drift gently down on the picture of woodland carnage.

And into that silence, that stillness, inject the following. “Daddy, do that again!”

Two months ago, I stood at my windows and watched the yard folk seed the mud pit that was the yard surrounding my house.  We had a great time, the sprouts and I, watching the shooting machine chew up and spit out bales of hay in a fine cloud of histamine-inducing grandeur that would hang like a haze three feet above the ground for days to come.  We watched excitedly as the tender shoots of fescue and Kentucky bluegrass poked their little heads above the dirt and protective hay blanket covering the yard.  We watched in joy as the predominantly-yellow color of the yard turned to the green as the grass began to outstrip the hay.  Then we watched in the past two weeks as the green baked out to yellow again in ninety-degree, 10% humidity days of blazing sun.  Ahh, it was a good run, if short.  The crunch-crunch of dead grass under our feet at least was better than the sploot-sploot of mud and dirt clinging to our shoes and through the house with the nice new, pale carpets all over.

But then this week, the summer thunderstorms have begun.  The place heats up, the clouds, haze, and pollution ceiling drops, and the humidity gradually approaches that of a shower cubicle, and it becomes necessary to evolve gills (I’m working on that) in order to get a good breath outside.  Just when the sudafed is about to become a table condiment, right next to the salt, pepper, and ketchup, the clouds get that swollen, scowly feel and the air gets even more still than before, just before the warm, wet wind slaps you like a pair of wet boxer shorts and the thunder rumbles.

The sky opens up and great, huge drops of condensed pollution splat and sizzle on the asphalt.  They bounce off the petrified dirt between the blades of dead grass, sizzling as they touch the dried hay and ooze their way onto the cracked earth.  They hit too fast to soak in, instead bouncing off and flowing into the low parts of the lawn (perhaps still graced with a few green blades courtesy of poor drainage.  The sky dumps a load of water on the ground for about fifteen minutes and the temperature drops ten degrees.  Then balance is restored, and the rain stops, moving on to the east.  The steam begins to rise from the hot asphalt and the undersea-adventure feel of the outside air is right back to that bathtub feel, except there’s a few more puddles, sucked up greedily by the roots of the grasses and weeds.

But mostly, by the weeds.  The grass fights and struggles and gives up the ghost at a hot look.  The weeds, though.  They flourish. They green.  They carpet the ground like lush velvet and creep into my garden and my flower beds.  I have to hand-tend my snapdragons.  I have to talk to the damn things to get them to poke their shy heads up from the ground, and reassure them that yes, they’re Mommy’s tough little guys.  Meanwhile, the wild carrot’s hogging all the playground equipment, stealing my rosebush’s lunch and kicking topsoil in the face of my salvia.  And the morning glory–which died where I wanted it, yet sprang up with vigor all the places I didn’t want–keeps skulking around the edges of the beds, trying to look innocent but obviously up to no good.  Just waiting for the minute I look away, and bullying the little guys to keep quiet with dirty looks and vague threats of being ganged up on later on.

I know we’re not in the right zone for it, but man–it’s a jungle out there.  And by “out there” I mean my front doorstep.

Ran into the neighbors on our daily walk around the neighborhood, and yanno, I think we’re all finally getting comfortable enough to be really friendly.  Now, their kids are grown up, so naturally, they’re a bit older than we are, so it’s not surprising to see them moving around a little slower than usual.  But at least they’re friendly.  They insisted that tonight, they really want to have us for dinner.  What a terrific neighborhood!

My backyard, such as it is, isn’t really so much a yard as it is the cleared-out space before the Wall o’Woods that stretches back over most of our property. Other fine features of the Wall o’Woods include the Dead Thing (that’s still there, stripped of everything but loose fur and bone–even the hide is gone), Little Crick, Big Crick, and Bigger Crick (and yes, I pronounce them that way), and a numerous amount of flora and fauna common to the American Midwest, like coyote, deer, and skunks. One new addition is something I didn’t expect to see, even out here in The Sticks.

Friday morning, Mr. Xandra’s enjoying a peaceful day off playing Evil Genius when he emerges from the Bat Cave (aka his study) and stage-whispers orders for everyone to beat feet to the Treehouse (aka the toy room). Usually a directive like this means there’s something interesting to be seen out the windows, and sure enough out under the trees at the edge of the Wall o’Woods, where the runoff ditch makes a respectable little stream on a wet day (and a swamp when we’ve got a damp stretch), there’s this giant…thing out there. Pecking at the straw over top of the grass seed we’ve finally had laid after three months of waiting for it to warm up.

“It’s a turkey!” Mr. Xandra whispers, as if the fowl in question could hear us all the way down there from the top of the house and from behind closed windows. Hell, it probably could. We spent several minutes, watching the turkey’s stately progress along the edge of the straw bed, where I’m sure it was making a nice snack out of my Kentucky Bluegrass/Zanzibar Fescue mix. I ran for the digital camera, moving cautiously because the study was also in the bird’s view. I had just enough time to snap off one picture before the bird, like its Jurassic-villain ancestors of yore, continued its ghostly, measured march into the trees and disappeared from view.

What impressed me was the hugeness of the thing. I mean, I’ve seen frozen turkeys at the store–bought ‘em, thawed ‘em, stuffed and cooked ‘em. Hell, I even bowled a halfway respectable game with them my freshman year in college. But seeing them with feathers and “on the hoof” so to speak, brings home that the turkey is one big motherfarkin’ bird. Probably could have looked one of my kids in the eye.

So after a call to the grandparents and two excitedy kids yelling, “Turkey! Turkey! Turkey, Nanna! Turkey, Pap!” for two whole minutes while my bewildered mother went temporarily deaf from telephonic interference, the first thing she said was, “So, I guess Thanksgiving’s going to be at your house this year.”

So I’ve moved house, into our new and beautiful home surrounded by woods and fields, and nature just drips from the eaves with redolence. Our first morning in the new house, we spotted an 8-point buck that had come to the stream to drink. Memo to self: do NOT mention to any hunter friends, else I might discover blinds in the trees in the near future. Two days later, we spy his harem of five does a-wandering in the empty lot next door. One of them, with a black stripe down her back, I recognize later when she’s sauntering across the road I’m trying to drive on. Two days after that, when we go stomping through said woods on a family walk, it becomes a Very Special Episode.

There are many times in my life where a freezing walk has resulted in a major life event. The first night Mr. Xandra and I spent together was in rundown, ought-to-be-condemned student housing in college during a snowstorm, without functioning heat. We didn’t really notice though, as we were young enough and randy enough to make our own heat. :3 Then in another February, eleven years ago in fact, Mr. Xandra and I took a walk out onto a frozen fountain where he got down on one knee and asked me to set a date.

But this year, in addition to giving me a beautiful home with enough closet space for all my old manuscripts and a woods full of natural inspiration for my muse, Mr. Xandra gave me magickal communion with nature. And that magickal communion with Nature just wouldn’t be complete without a confrontation with the far curve of the Circle of Life in the form of a half-eaten-down-to-the-bone DEAD-ASS CARCASS!

“Holycrapwhatthehellisthat!” says Mr. Xandra while on our walk. Attracted by the bleach-white bone and bright red bloody meat, he plunges off the path and into the brush by the stream, brandishing a convenient and hastily acquired hunk of tree branch, because you just can’t have a dead body around without wanting to poke it with a stick. Number One Son goes haring off after him, and I’m left on the path with The Girl, both of us staring down at the severed and frozen-bloody limb I just noticed I was about to step on before the detour, and me noticing the tufts of bloody hair and tissue dotting the trail like an amateurly-plotted CSI episode, showing how the body was, at one point, dragged downstream, only some parts seem to have made it further than others.

“Wow, neat! Look, Dad!” shouts Number One Son excitedly. He’s just been given a precious gift of Something Really Gross that will keep the entire preschool class enraptured for weeks. Poor Miss Debbie. I don’t envy her this. I can only imagine the parent-teacher conferences resulting from the artwork generated by this one. Every mother in the class will undoubtedly hate me for this.

“Don’t let The Boy near that thing!” I shout. “It’s full of germs!” Even though attending preschool has pretty much inoculated The Boy against most forms of rampaging creeping crud out there. But I still don’t want him dragging dead carcass cooties into my brand new house, where his little sister will likely think the Best. Game. Ever. involves putting something of it in her mouth.

“It’s too cold for germs,” Mr. Nanook of the North says.

“It ain’t too cold for gross,” I retort.

“It’s the circle of life,” the Mister insists, then proceeds to show Number One Son just how the ribcage protects–or in the case of dead things and highly motivated and hungry scavengers, fails to protect–the innards of an animal.

I’m really grateful that we decided to take this walk in the below-freezing temperatures. At least when your nostrils are frozen shut, you can’t smell how old the dead thing might be. Or how fresh.

I’m sure that Elton John sure as hell wasn’t thinking about this when he was writing for the Lion King. Although I bet with lions around instead of just coyotes and raccoons and the occasional carnivorously feral squirrel, that carcass would have just been a skeleton and a lot less…meaty.

I love Nature!

So…I’m moving to the Boonies (TM) next week. We didn’t originally call it The Boonies, and it really isn’t as full of Boonie-goodness as it could be. I mean, we still get city water and the trash gets picked up. Plus, we got us one of them indoor-outhouses. More’n one, in fact.

Now, life in a small town just outside a major city is a pleasant dichotomy of rural practicality and easy access to big-city culture. I can get sushi in my local grocery, along with farm-fresh bacon that still oinked last week. And within city limits, my town was one of those rare small towns who wanted to attract the exurbs, so in addition to having little old ladies who still give you free trashbags when you pay your utility bills, and an automatic subscription to the weekly newspaper, we also had a killer telecommunications department, which included digital cable, HDTV channels, and broadband internet through the city utility commission.

Now it is exactly five miles from my old doorstep to my new doorstep, two and a half of which are still within city limits. So last week, when I arranged for Internet services at the new address, you can imagine my surprise when I was handed the welcome package of two Dixie cups and a string. It’s kinda scary to realize that even the Borg Time-Warner won’t really venture out to where I’ll be living. My nights are now being filled with nightmarish scenes from “Scream” where I’m the big-busted babysitter who’s just discovered that “ZOMG the killer is in the house!” and I have no way to Instant Message anybody about it.

But perhaps I should count my blessings. I saw someone else leaving, who lives further out, carrying firewood and wet blankets…