I now own a pair of loppers. Loppers are pruning shears with very long handles, and they’re a poor capital investment for a city dweller. There’s just not much call for them on our 4,000 square feet of grass, bushes and flowers.
But Dianne and I are now also rural property owners, and loppers are very much a necessity as well as a piece of recreational equipment.
I have a long history with loppers. I’ve used a pair at my friend Jordy’s farm on occasional work days. For my hours of lopping I am overcompensated with steaks and beer immediately, and with the privilege of sitting in the woods later in the year, rifle or shotgun in my lap.
But at the Jordahl farm I had second thoughts for every lop. This was not my woody vegetation. I was always afraid that I might accidentally cut to the ground an oak sapling, prized and fiercely protected by Jordy and his parents, Bud and Marilyn, before him. In less than a second I could undo years of growth and destroy shade a hundred years in the future.
Now, on my own sprawling nine-tenths of an acre on a nearly pristine lake so far Up North that when you stop for gas and a Butterburger in Rhinelander you’ve still got an hour and a half to drive straight north, I am the master of my domain. Well, that’s an overstatement. We all have to answer to somebody, but she was busy scrubbing and arranging the kitchen while I was alone in our woods with the implements of destruction.
But this was creative destruction. You take down the overbearing big plants to open up views for humans and provide sunlight for smaller plants. Lopping is an act of liberation. In this case I was taking pine trees as high as 12 feet that had grown up way too close to our cabin, which had been more or less abandoned for a while before we bought it in December.
My enthusiasm for lopping grew as my pile of trees and branches stacked up. At one point I had the mouth of my cutters around the small tube that carries propane into the house. Luckily I hesitated before taking a snip that would have probably ruined the fun and possibly created a hole in the Isthmus columnist lineup.
After doing what I could around the cabin I walked down to the lake to see what else needed doing. To my keen disappointment the path was pretty cleared, and little lopping was required. But off the path the crowd of small pines grows thick, and the trunks are wider.
I trudge back up to the cabin thinking of spring and a chainsaw.
