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The sound of chainsaws woke me after a particularly difficult night of sleep. If you can call it sleep. It wasn’t early, but I was trying to catch up on what I’d lost during the night. I have plans that involve Scrabble tonight and I’m going to be humiliated even with sleep!

This noise has been a long time coming. The mammoth tree that came down in last year’s record storm is finally leaving and along with it, the spider infested shed that was completely rotten. As you can see from the photos in the post below, it was Ivy and plain stubbornness keeping the thing standing. Besides being useless, it has also become the Black Widow Hotel for the neighborhood. Yikes! So, down it came.

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Along with it came the top half the of Laurel hedge. IZ can now see Young’s River and the basin below from his office. He’s elated. One of the gardeners salvaged this nest from the Laurels. I do hope whatever bird it belonged to has moved on. What a pity if it should come back and find in its absence that its building went co-op! I’ve reluctantly allowed Luke (the owner of Arbor Care, can’t recommend these guys enough if you’re local!!) to take the nest to his girlfriend who is a photographer and artist.

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And along with the Laurels came down a good portion of my Lilac bushes/tree. One of which was so top heavy that the weight of all those blossoms was causing its trunk to split. Luke was nice enough to not slaughter the tree completely, as it’s still blooming. It will be pruned back further in the fall and he promises me that it will return to bloom again next year. I’ll be hedging my bets, pardon the pun, just the same and planting a few others in the hole. Just because lilacs grow like weeds here in Astoria is no reason I shouldn’t plant more! (and do click on the Astoria link: Old Oregon finally updated their outdated site and in its place is a lovely site full of amazing photos of the area! Change, change, it’s everywhere!)

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The majority of the blooms were tossed. However, I managed to do a little salvaging of my own. I cut down three, large, branch sections worth of lilac stems and then bundled them up and delivered them to neighbors. It seemed such a waste to let them all go into the chipper.

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And now the real work begins: clean up! Rain is promised for tomorrow—but today, it is glorious outside. All this change is hard to absorb but I’m salvaging hope in the midst of destruction. It’s hard not to be hopeful when the sun is out and your world smells of lilacs.