End of the Ficus, Part III

  Looking back through all the pictures of the house that I've taken, I realized that I never got a picture of the ficus in all its full sized glory, except as a bare-branched shadow of its former self after the first freeze.  I have pictures of the back yard, where you can see the ficus, but none do it justice.  It just soared over the yard.  The canopy was so thick, we had trouble growing grass beneath it.  We even selected plants that required shade to plant against the porch because they received no direct sun.  

  Teresa started the second day about the same time as the first.  Unlike the first day, the second day was clear and sunny.  And while there was the barest of hints that summer was thinking about ending, it was going to be brutally hot before they were finished.  The majority of the shade in the back yard used come from the ficus, and that was still lying on the ground waiting to be hauled away.  

 This time she brought help, muscle in the form of a 24-year old kid named Sean.  He was bright, intelligent and really hard working.  He went right to work without being told what to do, while Teresa went back to work trying to figure out how to bring down the last two limbs.  The problem was they were too weak to bear any weight.  She couldn't safely put up her ladder to cut the limb in half and bring it down in pieces.   So they decided to pull them down.

  Ficus wood, when dry, is not very heavy, or very strong.   They looped a line over the limb and picked a direction. The lightest of tugs on the line made the brach wobble and dance. Then they pulled, hard.  I think that was when my heart stopped.  Edward caught his breath. There was nothing to do but watch.

  The limb snapped and started toward the house... and missed by no more then six inches!  It clipped the bougainvillea under the back window, scraping the bark, but doing no real damage to the bush.  That's how I know it was that close.  I think the house gods were looking out for us, both Sunday and Wednesday.  I'm thankful.  Once again, the house escaped damage.  The limb that posed the most danger to the house was down.  

  One more to go.  This limb leaned over the chainlink fence.  They had to do the same thing, pull it down, but at least it was being pulled away from the house, this time.  They looped the rope over the last limb, tightened it up and pulled from the park side of the fence.  It snapped, sooner then expected.  And while I only saw it from the corner of my eye, there was an "oh, s**t" moment as Sean turned an ran from the oncoming branch.  It bounced off the fence and shattered into five or more pieces. 

  And that was it.  The threat to the house was over.  The last of the tall limbs were down.  The rest was clean up.

  Teresa took the stump down in pieces.  The first cut revealed the true nature of the ficus.  That it was, in fact, many trees all grown together.  When I planted it, it had been a house plant with many tiny saplings all in one pot.  Over the years they had grown into one massive trunk.  The freezes, it turned out, had killed 90% of those trunks, leaving only a thin sheath of live wood that wrapped just under half way around the base.  When it fell, that living wood flexed but didn't break.  In the wild, Edward and I figure it would have re-rooted, and started over, growing from where it had come to rest.   Before Teresa started cutting it up, the leaves had not even started to wilt.  It was still alive at that point, and that makes me sad.

    It took another hour to load the wood from the ficus onto the trailer they'd brought.  I saved a few logs, some long dead and dry, one from the living wood.  I'll give them time to fully cure.  Maybe one day I'll make something out of them, like the box I made from from Sandy's log.  I'd like to do that.  It will be something to remind me of that once glorious tree.  

    On that low, lonely stump in the back yard, the sap is still running from the live wood.  We're not going to get the stump ground, not yet anyway.  There is a small chance it will put out a shoot, and some part of it will survive.  A small chance that we'll get some part of our ficus back.  Maybe this time, we'll manage it better, and not let it get so big.

  End of the Ficus, Part I