It was a sad day on July 6th when our neighbor’s huge pine tree was taken down. It had been the target of woodpeckers for a few years, so that was a sign that it was likely distressed–and in fact the tree company later confirmed the core had rotted. Situated so close to both our houses, our neighbor decided it was too dangerous to keep. But we were all sad to say goodbye too. It was a beautiful old pine.

Because of its position, the tree company needed to use our driveway to get access to the tree. I was amazed at the extent of the production. There were three huge trucks–one in the driveway with a crane to lift a worker to chainsaw the tree in huge sections. Another truck was parked and stabilized just off the street in our neighbor’s yard and used an even taller crane with a cable to carry these huge sections of branches and trunk over to the street. A third truck shredded smaller branches. At one point, I went outside to see what the biggest crane was doing, since from inside, it seemed it was lifting the huge logs right over the top of our house.

So it wasn’t actually carrying them right over the top of our house–more like around the edge of our house. Still, these were huge sections of the tree. And then the final section of the trunk was lifted up.

And then they were done, and the big logs moved to our neighbor’s front lawn to be later removed, and the trucks gone. It all happened in two hours. I’m glad that we are in less danger of a huge tree falling on our house in a big storm. In fact, we’ll also likely see more solar energy production, since the tree cast shade on our solar panels in the late afternoon. But I wanted to mark this passing, make room for the loss, and especially to remember the beauty of the pine.