A few weeks ago I got a text from one of my Boise neighbors: a late spring snow storm had broken a bunch of limbs on the trees in my backyard—some of which appeared to be resting on the power lines running into the house.

Fortunately the parents were able to go over and do enough damage control to avoid immediate disaster. But it was still quite a mess.

And lest you mourn: these were not nice trees. Mostly messy crabapples and volunteer weed trees. The type that grow up through the fence line and scrape the eaves.

And I figured that if I was going to have an arborist come for pruning, I might as well have them fully removed to make way for fresh planting. So that’s what I did—and now I’ve got a gloriously clean slate and no more risk of downed power lines and damaged eaves.

The only inadvertent casualty was the neighbor’s fence, which apparently had a crisis of faith after I removed the chain link fence to access the trees and was found prostrate the the morning…