Grandpa Stories - TIMBER!

Grandpa and Dianna (his wife) came to visit yesterday. It was great to see them. I haven't seen Dianna for quite some time and she looked great. She had projects for the boys to do and they ate it up. They got to decorate sand buckets with cute foam pictures and then Ethan brought out the puzzles. He loved getting so much attention!

Grandpa is an amazing 84 year-old. They live in Tucson, Arizona but he comes up several times a year to see family and friends in American Fork, Utah and then also makes the rounds to my Uncle Mike's farm in Hagerman, Idaho and to my Dad's farm in Ontario, Oregon. Now that we live in Pocatello, he's started to go back to Utah through this side of the state to visit us and Sunnie and Brandon in Preston. This is the first year he has had someone to drive for him so it's fun to see other family members too. Last visit Aunt Karen and Uncle Wayne came and this time Dianna joined him for the trip.

While he was here, they saw my list of unfinished projects and noticed one of them was cutting down a tree in our back yard. One of our poplar trees started breaking off after all the extreme weather this year and needed to be cut down. Luckily, it was on the end and was going to come out anyway in another few years. I told Gary that I could take care of it and he started laughing and saying that I couldn't cut it down. Being the stubborn person I can be at times, I took that as a challenge. He told me that he would be bringing a saw home on Tuesday to cut it down which gave me Monday and Tuesday morning to get it down.

Well, all it took was for those two to notice it on my list and it was decided that Grandpa would "help" me cut down the tree. Ten minutes later we were in the back yard and he was sawing off some of the smaller branches so we wouldn't be trying to deal with extra weight. Next he started sawing out a wedge so we could push it to the canal bank. After that, he told me, "Well, I guess I'll let you try to cut for a while. Just cut straight across so we can get that wedge out."

I took the saw and started sawing at the base. He made it look sooooooo easy. I sawed for a while and was getting NO WHERE! He took the saw back and tried to make me feel better by telling me it was hard wood right where I was sawing because there was a knot and it was dying right at that spot. The next thing I know, he is pulling the tree over because we weren't going to get it to drop toward the canal with the way it was leaning. We pushed it over and rested it on the fence and then he let me saw off the top portion of the tree and he took care of the bottom. Anyone who knows Grandpa knows that when he said I could help him, he meant that he would do the bulk of it and let me step in when he thought there was something I could handle. Gotta love that man!

I'm out of time today but tomorrow I'll have to write about the baseball memories he shared with me going to Tom's game.