I’m not asking for help this time.
Just wanted to share this one so everyone can laugh at my expense.
A Tale of Timber and Tribulations
There are moments in life when you realize the universe has been quietly laughing at you for weeks.
Mine arrived in the form of a tree.
Not just any tree. A perfectly healthy, oxygen-producing, bark-covered son of a bitch standing exactly where my future goat pen needed to be. As an added bonus, it had thoughtfully scattered poisonous berries everywhere. Nature’s version of a glitter bomb, except instead of finding glitter six months later, you find dead goats.
The goats don’t even exist yet.
My fiancé had already emotionally buried them.
Somewhere between, “Let’s get a couple Nigerian Dwarfs,” and “That tree has to go,” she’d already planned the memorial service for livestock that haven’t even been born.
Meanwhile, I’m standing there with five hours of daylight left and twelve hours before the fencing crew returns, realizing I don’t actually own land.
I own consequences.
Nobody tells you that at closing.
The realtor hands you the keys with a smile.
What they really mean is, “Congratulations. Every bad decision Mother Nature has made since the Industrial Revolution is now legally your responsibility.”
That tree stood there for decades just waiting.
Waiting for one poor idiot with dreams of a little farm to buy the place so it could whisper,
“You forgot about me.”
Then my neighbor showed up.
No speeches.
No YouTube tutorials.
No twenty-minute TED Talk on what I should’ve done differently.
He looked at the tree.
Looked at me.
Probably recognized the expression every first-time landowner gets somewhere between confidence and complete psychological collapse.
Then simply said,
“Let’s cut it down.”
That’s when I learned something.
City people hold meetings.
Country people hold flashlights.
The chainsaws fired up.
Birds evacuated.
The squirrels filed for eminent domain.
The tree protested every inch of the way down, making noises that sounded exactly like my checking account every time I walk into Lowe’s.
Then gravity cast the deciding vote.
The old bastard folded.
The poison berries lost.
The imaginary goats lived to see another imaginary day.
The biggest surprise wasn’t bringing down the tree.
It was realizing there are still people who see someone buried in a problem and instinctively grab a chainsaw instead of a smartphone.
That feels rarer every year.
So here’s to good neighbors.
To borrowed experience.
To bark-covered sons of bitches that eventually become firewood.
And to learning that sometimes faith in humanity is restored one tree at a time.
Next stop… a gravel delivery and the impossible task of trying to make the world a little more level.
We all know that’s easier said than done.
Dispatches like this one are being collected in What The F(arm): Sixty Dispatches from an Unqualified Ohio Farmer — $40, half of which turns straight into hay for the horses, the mini donkey, and the baby goats. The presses roll when 100 people pre-order.