Relative Something

A tree in our woods has been leaning over one of our footpaths for more than a week. Each morning, Cyndie and I check with each other for opinions on whether or not it is leaning a little more. It had a good number of long, thin branches tangling with surrounding trees and many tall, skinny trees that got bent over as the leaner came down, so I was in no hurry to do anything about it.

Recent winds brought it close enough down that it had become too hard to ignore.

Our kids visited on Sunday, and during halftime of the Vikings game, Julian and I went out to soak up some of that hot sunshine. I took him down to see the fallen tree and spontaneously decided to see if I could pull free the bent-over trees it had caught on its slow descent toward the ground. When that resulted in success, we then took a shot at helping the leaner to come down the rest of the way.

It was a dramatic enough change that I knew Cyndie would be shocked, so I told Julian we weren’t going to say anything about what we had accomplished and wait to see what kind of reaction we’d get.

While we were back in the house, up in the loft watching the second half of the football game, I received the following image via text from Cyndie on the floor below us:

I reacted with utter surprise and asked when that could have happened. She and Elysa knew it was recent since they had been out on the trails earlier and it wasn’t down. Then Julian and I let them know what we had done.

Yesterday, I used a handsaw to trim off all the small branches. Even though I soon discovered it was really dense wood, I ended up cutting everything necessary to clear it off the trail without resorting to the chainsaw.

I had my suspicions about what kind of tree it was, but I asked Cyndie to take a picture of the bark with her plant ID app to see what came up. American Hophornbeam, also called Ironwood because of how hard it is. Ironwood trees are scattered throughout our woods, but they can be hard to notice. It seems like they hide in plain sight by looking unremarkable.

For 25 years, we lived on Ironwood Court, but I never had a clue about ironwood trees until we moved here.

Most often, it seems that I end up figuring out that I’m dealing with ironwood when I start cutting into it. For a guy who really likes trees, I can sometimes be surprisingly oblivious when it comes to identifying them.

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