the Walnut Diary

Since last Christmas my wife has maintained that this year the tree would be shorter than she has had since we moved to the Farm. My standard procedure has been to find a nice, straight white spruce from our many evergreen stands, preferably one which had waited a few years to grow from the initial planting, and then cut it to fit so that its top branch just cleared the bottom of the beam above the intended site, a height of about nine feet. This required the services of an eight foot ladder for the upper parts of the decoration process, of course, and used up a generous amount of floor space in that corner of the living room.

This year we set out on a brisk Saturday morning to find the sacrificial spruce. Without our granddaughter to provide a third set of eyes for this procedure, we settled on a tree of good texture and colour, and a somewhat shorter height. As I crawled under its branches with my little electric chain saw (a great tool, btw) I realized that the lower part of this trunk reminded me of the scotch pines we harvested and sold locally as a fundraiser for a trip to New York City in grade 13. These things all had dog legs in the lower trunk to the point that it was hard to tell which way was up when cutting them.

I thought no more of this until I had hauled the new tree into the auto shop and set out to trim it for the stand. The bottom foot of the trunk deviated about 15 degrees. So I took my usual wild-ass guess, made the cut, screwed the plastic plate to the bottom, and prepared to set it into the tub amid four screw clamps which buttress the thing into place. At each step things looked worse. One buttress screw ran out of threads. This has never happened before. The second cut was even worse. Shimming the plate with a screw produced no benefit. The tree was crooked to a fault.

In desperation I removed all of the mounting apparatus and stood it, teetering, in the back of the UTV. Then I discovered that my very clever wife had as yet no concept of scribing a line around an irregular object. She soon learned how to use a chunk of 2X4 from the shop floor and a black magic marker to establish a line for the chain saw cut. By this point we had used up nine inches of the dog leg, but we had selected this tree because it was shorter than the others, and could cope with a further diminution of its height.

So now it sits in its stand on the auto shop floor, its tank still dry in case we decide this afternoon to move it into the house before the coming snow storm.