The Oak Across Mom’s Lane

Monday

I called my foreman that evening and asked for three days of vacation. He did not hesitate.

Half the county knew about Mom’s lane by then, and he had a mother of his own.

Then I called Kenzie.

My daughter is 19 and just finished her first year of nursing school at the community college.

She was home for the summer, working weekends at the nursing home in Fulton. She has her father’s patience and my stubbornness, which is a hard combination to argue with.

“I’m coming,” she said before I had finished explaining.

“It’s going to be hot, and it’s going to be hard, and it’s going to be three days at least.”

“Mom,” she said, “Grandma can’t get to her cardiologist. I’m coming.”

We were at Mom’s lane by seven Monday morning. The sun was already up over the tree line and the dew was steaming off the pasture.

The forecast said 91 degrees with the humidity that makes Missouri feel like the inside of a mouth.

I had my own saw, a small one with an 18-inch bar that I use for limbs around my place.

And I had Dad’s old saw, which had been hanging in Mom’s machine shed since he died.

It is a big, heavy, old-fashioned saw with a 24-inch bar, and it takes three pulls even when it is warm.

I had cleaned it up the night before. New spark plug, fresh fuel, cleaned the air filter, put on a new chain I bought in town.

I had two gallons of fifty-to-one mix in red cans, a gallon of bar oil, two round files, a wedge, and a felling axe.

I wore my yellow safety glasses, and I had chaps for both of us. Orange chainsaw chaps, the kind with the long fibers inside that clog a chain if it touches your leg.

I bought a second pair at the farm store Sunday evening for $90, and I did not even blink at the price.

“Put these on,” I told Kenzie. “Every minute your saw is running, these are on. I don’t care if it’s a hundred degrees.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She buckled them over her jeans and pulled her long brown hair back into a ponytail.

Then she put on the clear safety glasses and the earmuffs I handed her, and looked at me. “Show me.”

How You Cut a Tree Like That

I had cut a lot of wood with Dad, but never a tree that size.

So I stood and looked at it for a long time before I started a saw, the way he taught me.

He always said the cut you make without thinking is the one that bites you.

A tree lying on the ground is not resting. It is loaded.

Parts of it are being pushed together and parts are being pulled apart, and if you cut into the wrong side, the wood pinches your bar or springs at you.

The top was the easy part. The crown had come down in the ditch and across the fence corner, a tangle of limbs as big around as my leg.

I started at the tips and worked toward the trunk, cutting each limb into pieces Kenzie could carry.

“Anything thinner than your wrist goes on the brush pile,” I told her. “Anything bigger, cut to sixteen inches. That’s what fits Grandma’s stove.”

She ran my small saw on the little limbs while I took the bigger ones with Dad’s.

I showed her how to stand to the side of the cut, never behind the bar, and how to let the saw do the work instead of leaning on it.

She was careful. She was slower than me and twice as careful, which is how I wanted it.