Putter or pillage

I would love to be able to tell you a fishing story this week, gentle readers, but the fact is I haven’t been fishing in ages. For some reason there always seems to be something more important to do than to attend to my own mental health, such as that is.
It would be nice, or at least convenient, if I could blame this deplorable lack of fishing time on somebody else, but I can only blame myself.. My better half is all for me getting out to the pond for a few hours now and then. Not only does it improve my general demeanor, which is in constant need of improvement, but also it gets me out of the house and keeps me from puttering.
Now, some men are productive putterers. They make useful things like table lamps or dinette sets, or they rewire entire rooms, or install new dishwashers. As for me, the only thing I am likely to do with a power saw is remove several of my fingers, and the last item I tried to rewire had the audacity to blow up. Since then the International Brotherhood of Electrical workers has threatened to picket my house if I so much as pick up a roll of electrical tape.
I must confess I understand their point of view.
Puttering simply is not my forte’. Not all of my household improvement projects have been unqualified disasters, but the ones that haven’t are so few that they really aren’t worth mentioning. Shakespeare, with his fondness for astrology, would say “I was not born under a puttering planet.” I’m fortunate if I can mow the lawn without making chutney out of several small animals. And that upsets me for hours when it happens, not to mention what it does to the lawn mower.
I did have one minor triumph a couple of weekends ago, however. It had to do with the fact that my yard seems to be populated with weak trees.
Over a month ago, a cotton wood tree in my front yard committed suicide. For no apparent reason, it just gave up the ghost one Wednesday night and fell over, snapping the trunk about two feet above the ground. Since then, its 25 foot carcass had been laying there lethargically, still in full foliage and green as all get out. Lacking the resources to remove the deceased, I had little choice but to wait for some good samaritan to come along and haul the thing off to make furniture out of, or some such thing.
The embarrassment of having such a monument to my lack of machismo in plain view became too great when a crew from a tree service company came knocking at the door one afternoon and asked if I wanted them to remove the body, for a fee of course. I sent them on their way and set about doing the deed myself.
I borrowed my son’s (very small) pickup truck and hauled out the chain saw I bought to remove the ice damage debris from my yard after the December, 2000, ice storms. I haven’t use it since. Small wonder, I couldn’t get it started. My younger son and I labored over that horror movie prop for half an hour before we gave up and decided to employ other means.
He brought out a couple of saws that weren’t meant for such a task, so naturally they wouldn’t work, and a double bladed ax. Then he and his mother hopped in the truck and headed off to borrow a functioning chain saw.
In their absence, I stared alternately at the ax and the tree, until I felt the blood of my insanely violent Germanic ancestors rise in my veins. No way this insolent hunk of suicidal lumber was gonna get the better of a descendent of a family of Prussian pillagers! I picked up the ax and commenced to swinging.
By the time my wife and son returned, I had reduced the tree to several manageable sized logs and a not insubstantial pile of wood chips. Unfortunately, I had simultaneously reduced myself to a sweat-soaked wreck.
My dear, much put-upon wife couldn’t decide whether she was impressed that I had managed a fairly convincing impersonation of Paul Bunyan, or angry that my rotten ticker and I had even attempted such a thing without an ambulance and a team of EMTs in attendance.
Okay, I may not be much of a putterer, but I can pillage with the best of ‘em.