Hurricane!

I find a lot of posts about how long it takes to repair hurricane damage, but here's one at a very personal level: a pear tree stump.

The stump didn't move for a week. I dug. I chopped roots. I filled the trench around it with water. I made a hole so deep I could stand in it up to my thighs. It didn't move. The stump of the Bradford Pear toppled by hurricane Isabel seemed determined to outlast me. When the storm broke the tree in half I had actually thought through how I would get rid of the stump. Instead of chain sawing it off at the ground I'd left a good three feet of trunk to use as leverage. The piles of debris were all gone before I even thought about working on...