Launch me to the moon

Yesterday evening I was down in the studio, painting a trumpet flower and feeling pretty good about having 3 hours to finish it before bed, when suddenly there was a terrible loud groaning, creaking, splitting noise from the back yard, then a crack like a gunshot. It sounded exactly like a large tree falling over. I was in a concrete room, half underground, the only exit was toward the noise, and the kids weren’t home to be smooshed if a tree went through their bedroom, so I just stayed very still right where I was. The lychee tree crashed into the house and shook the entire basement. 

It didn’t look as a dramatic as it sounded, but a limb as big as my torso had split from the trunk and fallen onto the patio roof, and it was hanging by a chunk that was making noises like it wanted to rip the rest of the way off. If it did, the huge limb would fall and break the patio furniture, maybe see-saw down and flip, putting the jagged end through a window. I stood and watched the break for about a minute to make sure it wasn’t going to fall immediately, then ran under it and pushed the furniture out of the way. I went to the tool shed, got a pair of branch cutters, dragged the ladder out, climbed up onto the roof, and cut about a hundred pounds of branches and lychee off the cracked limb to lighten it, racing nightfall and humming “Dumb Ways to Die”. Home alone, up on a roof, in the dark, climbing around a hunk of tree that could break off at any moment and catapult me into the sky. With a lighter load, the split stopped groaning, and the tree settled down.

What kind of tree makes so much fruit it tears its own limbs off? That is bad planning. 

Today, I got back up on the roof and cut a few more hundred pounds off the tree, throwing branches and fruit down onto the patio. Ate a few of the biggest ones (fruit, not branches). The outdoor shower was buried under branches, so I had to excavate it and sweep the corrugated roof before I could wash off all the sweat and grime. That counts as a workout for today.

As a reward for all that, one of my library patrons brought me a plastic container with two dead rhinoceros beetles for my invasive species painting. These things are terrible pests, but also very hard to get hold of because they’re found high up in coconut trees, so I’m kind of excited to have some. 

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