Member-only story
Don’t Buy A Fixer Upper
It took me 19 years to love my house and now I may lose it.
I don’t know when the ash trees died. By my estimate, it was at least eight years ago, maybe longer. That means we let them stand, dead, for nearly a decade because we could not afford to remove them.
This past spring, I finally called the town to see if there was anything they could do. Two of the trees were precariously balanced near the road. I could scarcely afford to have them both removed, but luckily I didn’t have to come up with the money. The town came by a couple of weeks after I called and took the trees down for me, much to my unending relief.
A third dead ash tree that was further back on our property, right beside the driveway, also needed to be removed. Nine years ago, when the girls were ten and seven, my husband had used that particular tree as the foundation for a swingset.
He’d screwed a sturdy plank to the tree, and built an A-frame contraption to support it on the opposite side. We hung four blue plastic swings on the homemade marvel, all of us quite pleased with the results. In retrospect, the tree was probably already dying.
The final ash tree fell on its own two weeks ago. It simply keeled over, taking down another tree, which destroyed my neighbor’s carport. We escaped with our lives, and most of our property, intact…
