The Coffee and Chainsaw Connection

I pushed the familiar number on speed dial on my cell phone to let my friend Judy know I was running late for coffee.

This is nothing new, sometimes the "I'm running late" call comes from her end. We have four kids (now adults in varying stages) apiece, and two ex-husbands (one each). She has two grandkids, I have a dog and a cat and a "grand-pug" and two "grand-cats" that sometimes come to visit. Her house burned down about a year ago, my fifteen acres of fields and woods are starting to crowd me and look like something Maurice Sendik dreamed up. We both have things that make us stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night.

We're always trying to cram one too many things into our lives, but we try to make time for coffee once in a while, around hair appointments and sick children and travel plans and work schedules and the assortment of surprises life's always throwing at you. I invariably drink my coffee loaded with chocolate and whipped cream. Judy's the more adventurous one, she'll foray into things with pumpkin spice and caramel this time of year. Thirty years ago or so when we met, Judy was a dead ringer for the actress Kate Bosworth of "Blue Crush" and "Beyond the Sea" fame. I looked thirty years younger then too, and my hair was really and truly brown. I don't look like anybody famous, but I remind a lot of people of somebody they've already met. When somebody I work with told me they thought I looked like Annette Benning, I could have busted a rib laughing.

It's good to have friends who know where the bones are buried and always forgive you for falling off your diet. Because, as we all know, coffee loaded with whipped cream and chocolate will always be the slippery slope.

This morning, though, my excuse was a tad unorthodox, and eight hours later I'm still turning over the particular combination of words in my head.

"I'm running a little late because my chainsaw got stuck in a log."

Good lord, what being single has done to me!!

Now before you start to picture me as Paula Bunyon with a blue ox parked in the garage, picture this. Only two weeks before, I was doing the tango--badly, but with enthusiasm--on a vintage dance hall floor in a polka-dotted silk chiffon dress, magenta suede stilettos with tiny patent leather bows, and a Gerbera daisy the size of a saucer in my hair. I like shoe shopping, I'm absolutely addicted to chocolate, and I really like to be pampered.

Four years ago, when the ink was barely dry on the divorce that had followed a long and very traditional marriage (he worked long hours, I kept the home fires burning and the soccer uniforms washed), I didn't know a hex wrench from a jar of honey. But little by little, necessity being the mother of invention, I've accumulated a few tools and now know how to use them. A cordless drill was the first, sparked by the need to immediately fix a pasture fence to keep the horses in. A tool kit, though to be fair, it's really a pretty turquoise and opaque white fishing tackle box. A level. And the piece de resistance, the rechargeable-battery operated chainsaw. That purchase was made after one windy night when a large dead tree came down across my driveway and shattered, and I had nothing but a handsaw to use on some of the larger limbs. Aerobics classes be damned, that was hard work!

Envisioning yet more dead trees coming down across the driveway at inconvenient times such as when I'd be leaving for work, I took myself shopping and picked out the smallest, most benign-looking chainsaw I could find. It's not much bigger than a blender, though it still carries the requisite air of potential dismemberment that keeps me treating it with a lot of respect. And wearing heavy leather gloves. I remember still how terrified I was when, on one vacation, my ex-husband would disappear solo into the woods for several hours at a time to trim trees and brush on a lakefront lot we had purchased when the kids were still quite small. Death, disaster, life as a widow, all sorts of dire scenarios ran through my head like leaves in a storm until he'd walk through the door again, still in one piece. Now it's my friends who worry about me on the weekends as I wield my tiny chainsaw in the woods, battling nature and, to be honest, losing most of the time.

This morning's hitch came about as I was trying to detangle a Gordian knot of three dead trees that had crashed down on each other in a windstorm a couple of weeks earlier. I'd been working on it every opportunity where there was brief spell of dry weather. If a tree falls in a forest, nobody much gives a damn. But one of these trees had fallen into the beautiful crabapple tree at the edge of my yard that I had gotten from the kids for Mother's Day years earlier. Another rested in the branches of a smaller trash tree twenty feet away. And they had all come down like a giant three-dimensional game of JENGA. One fell east, one fell southeast, and one fell north atop each other, forked branches intertwining. As I cautiously worked on cutting the farthest, smallest branches and clearing out a thicket of leafy vines that obscured those complicated spatial relationships, I stood back often, trying to figure out what I could safely pull on that wouldn't have something else and something bigger fall on me.

I thought I had it all figured out, with several fireplace-sized cuts of wood already stacked on the lawn from my efforts today. But then as the little saw blade gamely tore through yet another good sized tree limb, something further up the line jiggled, and then something else shifted, and then the half-cut tree-limb closed down on the blade and the jig was up. I tugged, and tugged, and tugged some more, but it was hopeless. At least for me. I trudged back to the garage and brought out my hand saw and put a lot more elbow grease into freeing my stuck little battery-operated tool than I ever thought I'd do with a saw again. Then I put everything away and drove to meet Judy for coffee at a frou-frou coffee joint.

There have been a lot of little "self-sufficiency" markers in the past four years, starting with dragging out a ladder to change the light bulb in the foyer (always a source of much cursing by my ex, and, I've discovered, with good reason) and moving on to installing handles on the basement storage cabinets, replacing a bathroom fixture, and fixing a toilet. Twice. Nothing that I'd ever contemplated when my understanding of life roles came down to "his" and "hers." Much has changed since then, some of it still making my head spin if I think about it too much.

I still like chiffon, spike heels, romantic walks on the beach, and bouquets of flowers for absolutely no reason.

But dang it...I like my little chain saw too!!

Ship Out of Water

A trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum is always such a visual treat, long before you even get to the artwork on display inside. Part "ship out of water," part mechanical giant butterfly, with a Dale Chihuly glass "tree" inside the lobby that looks like it's from "under the sea" and giant aspen leaves that never fall just down the street at Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin, it's always an excuse to grab a cup of coffee and just stop and stare for a while...