Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

In order to explain to you the project I’ve taken on, I need to tell you about a tree.  It was in the yard when we moved into our house in 1990. It was a tall tree even then and of a type I’d never seen before: A Tree of Heaven.

Trees of Heaven are not particularly pleasant trees.  They are fly pollinated.  They bloom and their blooms smell with a smell that attracts flies as opposed to honey bees or butterflies or hummingbirds.  Trees of Heaven have kind of a weedy quality when they are young, but–as I found out recently–they are solid all the way through.

However, last year our Tree of Heaven started dropping limbs on our neighbor’s yard, taking down our neighbor’s utility lines. We like our neighbor more than our tree. 

It wasn’t even close.

The tree had to go, and go it did, but our tree had entangled itself with the fence, so we had the tree men leave a six-foot stump.

And there it stands in our back yard: An Opportunity.

If I were a younger man, or a stronger man, or a man with more testosterone coursing through his veins–and if I had the talent–I would take my chainsaw and carve it into a statue.

But I am not. And I don’t. So I won’t.

But there are other options.

My wife had an idea.

In this world, there are people who are capable of whimsy and those who are not. I am a person who is and I am fortunate enough to marry someone who is too. (Either we seek each other out or no one else can stand us.) She suggested that “we” should put a roof, a door, and windows on this and turn it into an elf house.

I agreed and awaited instructions.

Time passed and at some point, I figured out she was using a different declination of pronouns than the one taught in school. In school, they teach us that “we” is first person plural. In this usage it means “me and you.” The declination she was using was one you learn in the School of Life that I’ve come to know as the administrative declination wherein “we” often means “you.” 

This was one of those cases. 

So “we” have begun turning the stump into a house.

Though it is of a size appropriate for elves or pixies, I’m not thinking about it in those terms.

Like I said, we–my wife and I in the usual declination–are whimsical.  When the Harry Potter books were new, we read them as a family as they came out.  My favorite characters from those books were the Weasley Family.  (The mom was my particular favorite.)  When I looked at the tree stump with the idea of turning it into a house, in my mind’s eye it looked like the Weasley House, so that is how I am going to think of it.

As I’ve already mentioned, I am neither a young man nor a strong man nor a man with an over-supply of testosterone, so I am going to take this project slowly.  

On Sunday, I took some measurements and located some scrap wood.

On Monday, I attached some two-by-fours to the top of the stump so as to provide a place to attach the roof. Doing this required me to carve out some flat spots on the tree, and I did use a chainsaw in this process, so maybe I do have a little testosterone left.

Tuesday, I took my scrap wood and cut it to size in preparation for building the roof.

And on Wednesday, I took the morning to run some stuff to the landfill, and then I wrote this.

It’s going to take a while: Maybe the rest of the summer; maybe into the fall and winter.

When it’s done, we will have something that we can enjoy along with any whimsical garbage men who come rumbling down the alley.

But that’s okay. If I can make a garbage man smile, that is effort well-spent.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com. He has several other stories about his travels in Paraguay posted there.