Observations

Lightening tree (above and right)














Pears (below) on the tree
Pears in the tree (still)

More pears on the ground
Pears on the ground






Observations
A couple of weeks ago, I grumbled and complained on an off line that my modem seemed to have blown and I could make DSL connections and- and -.

Carl, the homeless, came back and got some work done in my yard (and then disappeared again, I hope he is working happily in the chicken factory and doesn’t need me any more).

I got an offer and signed a contract for the sale of my house to a company that plans to turn it into a super minit market/service station. The whole thing is conditional on getting a zoning variance, which may or may not be possible so it could go up in smoke.

PATIENCE! I think I can tie all this together, and if I can’t, well----I can’t. But any way, I decided that if I was going to move, I would make a record of some of the stuff in and around my house. In preparing to do that, I took Carl with me out into the yard to get him to help me make it somewhat presentable for pictures. As we walked around the yardd and I pointed out bushes that need trimmed, lawn that needed cutting, stuff like that, he asked me when lighting hit the tree. Not knowing what he was talking about I asked him “What lightning? What tree?” He pointed out a tall pine tree (about two feet thick at the base, and about ten feet from the headboard of my bed) that had a strip of white from the roots clear up to the top of the tree. “That there tree. See that burr all the way to the top. That’s lighting, and the tree’s gonna die and you’ll have to cut it down”.

I had never seen a tree hit by lightning that wasn’t shattered at the top and turned into toothpick shards, but it was obvious that he knew what he was talking about, and that I understood why my modems, my network cards and my router were no longer functional. The wonder is that I didn’t have melted wires both in my power system and in the head that had lain sleepily on the pillow through the noisy thunderstorm (about ten feet from where the lighting struck) as well as a destroyed roof and whatever else kind of damage would come along. (If blogger cooperates, their will be two or three pictures of the lightning scarred tree that DIDN’T fall on my head.

As we walked around the yard, we passed both of my pear trees (I have a picture of one of them back in my post about the spring in Georgia). I have given away at least two bushels of pears, I have steamed two pots of pears and put the fruit in the refrigerator to eat for breakfast. I have made at least three gallons of pear juice, one of which now sits in the refrigerator waiting for me to try to finish it before I travel to Finland next week. Between my wife, second son, and my self, we have made six or eight pear cobblers to take to friends, and eaten two or three ourselves (best with Blue Bunny vanilla ice cream, but pretty darn good with half and half or whipped cream sprayed from a can.) and the task I gave Carl was to shovel up the pears that littered the ground under both trees. (The orient pears, which are the shape of grapefruit and so juicy that you can’t eat one and keep a clean shirt, were no longer on the tree. All had been picked, eaten, given away, or fallen on the ground to be eaten by wasps, fire ants, sugar ants, and a variety of critters, or to rot.) The pineapple pear tree was a special mess, so he raked up a wheel barrow full of rotten pairs from the orient, and two wheelbarrows full of semi-rotted pears from the pineapple pear tree and put them out on the curb for the trashman. This happened at the end of last week. Carl has not returned, so yesterday I picked, and picked up, another big box of pears, took another couple of Wal Mart plastic bags to otherwise innocent friends who probably are now giving them to their friends. The pictures (if blogger wills)above will show a ground littered with at least a wheel barrow load of pears and a tree that is still so loaded with fruit, that I am going to Europe next week, and I will pretend that they were put to some kind of good use. I expect to come back in ten days to find a foot deep pile of rotted pears (unless I can talk the house-sitter into picking them and giving them away, but I suspect that such is not in the contract.)

If all goes well, sometime within the next 180 days my house will belong to someone else, I will have moved to somewhere else, and I will probably be feeling really wistful about this old brick barn that has been home for the past thirty plus years. In the mean time, the pecans will fall from the tree, and, thanks to the pride of feral felines in the yard, this year I should be able to pick up a few pounds to give away for Christmas.
If all doesn’t go well, I will probably move anyway, and turn my house into one the the many home grown dormitories surrounding the university. We’ll see.