Breaking Ground (and Losing Trees)

Early this morning, the woodland flowers were reaching for the sun.

The butterflies were visiting the abelia.

None of them realized that the end was near.

Behold the beast!

The beast was hungry and demanded to be fed.  Like a Jurassic giant, it began to devour the woods.

The trees couldn't outrun the savage maw of the mighty trac hoe.

But as the trees were felled, Jason the grader and his trusty assistant, sawed them into logs and set them aside for Drew to give them new life as floors.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, the pile of logs for flooring grew.

Tomorrow Drew Leviton will come and take the logs away to be sawn into boards.  Then he will store them in a barn. When the house is nearing the stage for flooring, he will kiln dry the boards and take them to a mill for planing and tongue and grooving.

I'm glad that we can return the trees back to their ancestral home in some way.

Jason and his assistant were as gentle as they could be.

First they dug around the roots.

Then they tipped the trees over.

The branches and root balls were piled neatly up to be chipped into mulch for erosion control.

It was all done in a very neat and workmanlike fashion.

But still, it was sad and some of the images were disturbing. 

The red earth streaming from the root balls seemed like the trees were bleeding.

And somehow the rootballs being carried by the trac hoe over to the mulch pile resembled decapitated heads to me.  By the end of the day, the debris pile looked like a scene from a Gheghis Khan biography.

So sad that progress has to come at such a price.