Christmas Joy

     “Merry Christmas and I wish I could help you,” the passerby lady said.  There was real sympathy in her voice.

     “Thank you.  You aren’t the only one who wishes you could help me,” I replied as I straightened up and turned to face her.

        The lady just came from the post office building and walked past my car to get to her car, both parked at the curb in front of the building.  She got into her car and drove away.  I turned to my car with the engine hood raised, tool kit lying on top of the motor along with various pieces of plastic moldings, a few screws, and various screw drivers and wrenches.

     It was December 23, the day we had chosen to celebrate Christmas with the girls and families.  I had gone Christmas shopping early (8:30) that morning.  I left the gifts covered with jacket, gloves, scraper, other paraphernalia that collects on the seat of the pickup while I helped with preparations for the anticipated evening. That included vacuuming and cleaning a bathroom or two. 

      About one p.m., the Goodwife left for the post office with a couple of items to send to her mother for Christmas.  I finished my brief repast, retrieved the items from the pickup and just about finished wrapping the first one when the call came. 

     “I’m at the post office and the car won’t start.”

     I did what you should never do, assumed.  The day before, I had trouble getting the switch to turn.  I urged her to wiggle the steering wheel right and left as she turned the key.  Nothing.  Try shoving the shift lever up as you turn the key.  Still nothing.

    I left unwrapped gifts lying on the couch loosely covered with wrapping paper and other stuff.  I grabbed an extra set of car keys and took off for the post office. 

     The Goodwife got out and I slid behind the wheel.  Bells dinged and lights flashed as I inserted the key into the ignition.  The switch turned without difficulty.  The dinging stopped, the lights went out, and there was a barely-audible click, click, click. 

     Instantly it dawned on me that I had made a wrong assumption and should have fished for a few more symptoms.  I had brought not tool one.  Well, not one I needed, anyway, to clean corroded battery cable ends and battery terminals, or to replace a battery.

     I popped the hood to see how bad it would be.  In the good old days, this would be a ten or fifteen minute fix.  The battery would be easily accessible in one of the four corners of the engine compartment.  Remove and clean cables.  Clean battery terminals and replace cables, and you are on your way.

     In newer vehicles, 2001 in this case, so many plastic covers and cases have to be stowed in the engine compartment that the battery has had to find other places to hide.  In the dearly departed Aurora, for instance, cleaning cable ends would have meant removing the back seat to find the battery lurking in its covered box.  That almost sounds inviting in comparison to what was ahead of me.

     Chrysler engineers interred the battery beneath the air filtering apparatus in the right front corner of the engine compartment.  By looking closely you can barely see the positive terminal hiding in the dark below and between the air filter housing and the right front headlight housing.  See, yes.  Reach with hand or tool, no. 

     (See it?  Top center-to-right is the air filter housing.  The hexagonal bolt head in the center is the hood support.  The battery terminal is the two little bolts in the crevasse between the air filter and above left of the hood support.)

      Still not thinking clearly, we went home in the pickup.  The Goodwife prepped the prime rib for the oven as I gathered socket wrench set and screw drivers, finally a whole tool box.  Having stood in the sharp wind for a few minutes while studying the situation under the engine hood, I also donned my Carhart insulated coveralls.  The prime rib went into the oven, the timer set to go off in one hour.  Would anyone be there to hear it?  It was 3 o’clock.  Back to the post office we went.

       The air filter box came off with only one broken plastic ear.  The positive battery terminal was now accessible.  A thorough cleaning took about fifteen minutes.  The negative terminal?  Still hidden beneath the headlight housing.  The battery has to be “slud” (thanks to Dizzy Dean for that wonderful word) back to get to the negative side.

      The fender well is about an inch behind the battery, leaving no room to slide the battery back.  There is a removable plastic panel in the plastic fender well.  If I remove that panel, will the battery run into the right front tire?  I have heard that to change batteries on these cars, you have to remove the tire.  I really didn’t want to do that there in the parking lot.

  

     Then the idea hit me.  Why not try jump-starting the thing?  If cleaning the positive terminal didn’t work, I could jump-start it and take it home to the privacy of my own garage to disassemble the thing and screw it up out of public scrutiny.  That seemed a better idea than tackling the removable panel and maybe a tire.

      I reassembled everything.  Behind the steering wheel, the start attempt was rewarded with a repeat performance, bells, lights, clicks, but no start.     This time, when I removed the key, the instrument panel continued to flash and click.  Oh no, what did I do to the thing now?

     The parking spot on the Chrysler’s left opened up, so I stood in the space while the Goodwife backed the pickup out of its space, backed up going the wrong way, and pulled into the vacancy to Chrysler left.  The jumper cables were behind the Dakota seat the whole time.  Why did it take so long to think of them?

      The battery in the Dakota is on the left side.  The cables were about five feet short of reaching across both engine apartments and the space between vehicles.  So we waited and waited for the driver of the car on the Chrysler right to appear.  Finally he showed.  The Goodwife stopped traffic by backing up and poising the poor old Dakota in position to take the soon-to-be vacated parking spot.  Eventually, the guy pulled out, the Goodwife pulled in, the traffic cleared, and we were ready to try again. 

       It took a few trips between vehicles to get good enough contact to run the Chrysler starter.  It started.  And died.   (Later: starting and dying seem to be part of the computer readjusting things, as it died all three times when I started it after breaking the electric contact.)

      No matter how I tried, I was never able to get good enough contact with the jumper cables to get the starter to run again.  It was nearing 4 o’clock.  The stove timer would be sounding soon.  The very careful cooking instructions said an hour on, then off, do NOT open the oven door EVER until ten minutes before meal time.  (Heat for another hour before mealtime, no matter when that time comes, but do NOT open the oven door.)

     The Goodwife vacated the coveted parking spot and headed home to shut the oven off and do a few other things preparatory to Christmas dinner.  I would try one more time, and if that attempt failed, we would have to abandon the Chrysler to the post office parking lot for the approaching night.

      The air filter stuff jumped right off, being used to the routine by now.  I was tackling the removable panel in front of the tire when the lady walked by, apparently for the second time, and wished me Merry Christmas.  She was the second of three of all the people who came and went during my predicament who spoke or acknowledged that I was there.  The first person was an old guy who asked if I needed a jump.  I explained we were waiting for the parking spot we needed.  He nodded and left. 

     The plastic fender well panel came off without breaking anything.  After removing the hold-down, the battery would slide back.  By lifting it slightly and resting the back end on the tire, I could just get a wrench on the negative cable clamp.  I could bring the cable out far enough to clean it thoroughly.  The battery post was a little more difficult.  I wasn’t sure the battery could come out without removing the tire, so I gave the terminal a fair scouring with it in place.

      I was getting the air filter back in its place when a lady parked on Chrysler left.  She came around her car to see if I was okay.  I assured her I was okay and explained I was about to finish the repair and check the results. 

     The Goodwife arrived while the lady was in the post office.  The lady returned just as I was getting behind the wheel to give it another whirl.  She got in her car and rolled down her right window so she could hear the results of my attempt.

    The Chrysler started.  And died.

     I tried again and this time it continued to run, roughly and smellily for a little while, then normally.  The lady gave me a thumbs-up and departed.

     It took a while to clean up, gather the tools, put the removable panel in the trunk.  The Goodwife got in the car, but she advised me to follow her just in case.  So home we went in tandem.  The Chrysler was safely in the garage and we could rush about getting Christmas supper ready to go.

      I walked into the house and glimpsed the unwrapped presents scantily clad in wrapping paraphernalia on the couch.  Oh well.  If someone snooped, that was her shauri.

       Our guests arrived a bit late, the prime rib got a little overdone due to our imprecise guess as to meal time, not due to subpar cooking instructions, I’m sure.  (No, we did NOT open the oven door until we removed the beef from the oven.)

  We had ourselves a Merry Little Christmas, in spite of the day’s imperfections.

Hauling Wheat

     The price of wheat crossed the $6 mark a week or so ago, on the way up from the $5.50 range.  The weather felt more like October than December, reaching into the sixties at midday.  I was growing soft, lazing around till the sun gets up before I rise, taking a nap in front of a boring tv show in the evening. 

     In the back of my mind lurked a binful of wheat and the specter of a huge blizzard roaring down the plain, leaving unnavigable drifts across the yard.  (I inherited the ability to worry about every imaginable catastrophe from my mother.)  The price of wheat would rise with the drifts and ebb as the obstructing snowbanks slowly melt in the spring, and I would be unable to take advantage of the bad weather market rise.

      Add the chainsaw sans fuel or chain oil, leaving me no real excuse to get outside into the sunlight.  The weather, the wheat market, the mental irritants, all got under my shell enough to provoke a little action.  We shall have to wait to see if the result is a pearl or some other less worthy secretion.

     The factors all came together with enough critical mass to overcome the winter inertia.  I took the next step.  I put it on the calendar.  I would be gone, hauling wheat from Tuesday till Saturday, probably. 

     Monday was already taken.  The barbershop “boys” (I’m pretty sure I was the youngest singer) sang Christmas carols at two Fort Collins assisted living facilities.  Otherwise, I could have given myself another day to meet the challenge of man and machine versus Murphy’s law.  You do have to have priorities straight.  By leaving on Tuesday, I still made a mighty sacrifice, the first barbershop gathering in my new residence where we would do something other than Christmas carols (Bathless Groggins shudder.) (If you understood that allusion, I know two things about you:  You are older than dirt, and you read the Sunday funnies.)

     Off I went early (9 o’clock) Tuesday morning.  I had a few calls to make in Limon, insurance agency, barbershop (the real haircutting kind, there were five guys in there, I’m still shaggy), e-waste stop, hardware store for a dust mask for when I have to enter the grain bin and scoop—pretty optimistic, eh?

     Around one p.m., I pulled into the farm and set the house to warming—started a fire in the stove, turned up a couple of heaters.   I ate a little lunch which I had thoughtfully provided, and I tended the wood fire.  Then I turned to the matter at hand, hauling wheat.

    I had four motors to get started.  Three might be difficult but doable.  One was very questionable.  It was the Willie Suchanek Lawson auger engine.  It hadn’t run for at least ten years.  It must be fifty years old. 

     No sense in doing anything until I got that engine started.  It was still mounted onto the sprayer deck on the “water trailer” in the red barn.  Off the engine came and out into the warm midday sun where I attempted to start it.  Priming it by putting a few drops of gas down the air intake produced no result. Neither did a few drops of gas in the spark plug hole.

      This is serious.  No spark.  The flywheel has to come off to get to the breaker points.  Remove fuel tank, cowling, then the flywheel.  It can be difficult, but with a gear puller putting pressure on it, it popped right off with a pry from a screw driver.  I filed the points flat and reinstalled everything.  It now sparked.  I couldn’t see the spark, but I could hear it snapping. 

     This time it took off when I primed it.  After two hours of work, that was a positive.  But it would only run as long as I dripped a little gas down the air intake when it sputtered.  Carburetor time.  Pulling the carburetor off reminded me that once while transporting the engine from sprayer to auger, it bounced off the golf cart and broke the bracket that holds fuel tank, air intake and carburetor mount.  That repair involved a weld, some silicone gasket goop, and some JB Weld.  I ended up having to redo the silicone and the JB Weld.

      That ended day one of the wheat hauling adventure.  Time to let the goo dry.

      Wednesday morning the thing started right up and ran a little better.  I drug out the sixteen foot auger from the combine shed and hauled it to the grain bin with the golf cart.  Some digging was required to open the channel under the granary floor.  That auger got a lot heavier over the past ten years, but I got it into place and mounted the engine.

     The Mayrath auger took a little work, but started right up.  Add belts and it was ready to go.  Both trucks cooperated.  By about 1 p.m. I was set to give it a try.  For a while, I would start one auger engine.  When I went to start the other auger engine, the first one would die.  Finally, the Briggs decided to keep running so I could attend the Lawson.  It would run just fine as long as I stood right by it.  When I left to open the grain slide under the granary, it would die.

    Finally I got the slide open, both engines running, and some grain actually hit the truck floor.  The Briggs decided the load was too much, so it died.  While I was starting it, the Lawson died.  Back and forth I went.

     During this time Neighborly drove up, unnoticed by me.  He saw the open door on the east end of the combine shed and thought he better investigate.  When I failed to notice him, he yelled.  I jumped, a big.  He caught me totally by surprise.  We had a short visit and back I went to rope-pulling wind sprints.

     When it came time to move the truck, the Lawson would stop when I left it.  I must have pulled that starting rope a mile if you add up all the three foot tugs.

     As the truck filled I had to move it four or five times.  About two more moves and it would be full.  The Lawson died again.  I shut the truck off, restarted the Lawson, went to move the truck one last time.  It wouldn’t start.  Quickly I released the tension on the Lawson belt, stopping the flow of wheat.  Now I had leisure to find the problem with the truck, but with both engines running, I couldn’t hear what the truck was doing.

     So I had to shut both auger engines down.  A corroded battery cable was soon diagnosed and cured.  (I just realized how dependent a mechanic is on hearing—better he should lose his sight than his hearing.)  “Pulling dem ropes” yet again, I topped off the load and tarped it.          

     The truck loaded, I got to town about 4 o’clock.  The boys at the elevator had a tomorrow deadline to get ten train cars loaded, so I had to be worked in.  It was dark when I got about halfway home.  Pulling the truck light switch lit the instrument panel, the tail lights, the clearance lights, but nary a headlight.  I carefully felt my way home the last three miles.

     Day two, one load down.  Thursday morning, the Lawson was back to stage one, no spark, no fire, not even a pop when treated to a little ether.  This time flywheel removal revealed that I had not tightened the flywheel onto the crankshaft tight enough during the first surgery.  What running it did had completely chewed up the square key that holds flywheel to shaft.  Worse the key ways in both the flywheel and shaft were buggered.

      I began to entertain the thought that I would need a new engine before I could haul a second load of wheat.  I had no eighth inch key stock, so a trip to town was necessary.  I cleaned up the key way on the shaft and flywheel, but I hadn’t a lot of hope that I could hold the flywheel in time with the shaft.  J B Weld to the rescue.  Hey if it was good enough for the carburetor, why not the flywheel?

       I put some goop around the key way and mounted the flywheel.  No spark.  Quickly I removed the flywheel before the glue set up.  I filed the points again.  They may have been fouled by metal flecks from the disintegrating key.  Reglue and reassemble.

     While I waited for the glue to set up, I found another thing on the carburetor to clean.  Fortunately, I could remove the jet without removing the carburetor.  A brief soak in some solvent followed by some good air blasting and a light wire brushing returned the jet to a normal state.

       This time, priming with a few drops of gas followed by a tug on the rope resulted in a smoothly running engine.  A miracle!

       Mount the Lawson on the auger again.  It started right up again.  The Briggs gave me a little trouble, but when I went to attend to it, the Lawson kept running.  I got loaded and headed for town between 2:30 and 3:00.      

      By four o’clock, with the sun threatening to die on me (starter rope not long enough to reach it) I was in position for a first.  When I started both engines, they both ran straight through, getting the truck fully loaded without once having to restart something.  Tarp the truck and call it a day.            

      Friday morning I scaled the truck a few minutes after eight.  I was there again at eleven.  I returned the third time about 1:30.  So I should have tried for a fourth load?  A check of the bin revealed I would get about 100 bushels loaded, maybe 200, and then the rest would have to be shoveled.  I wasn’t up to that.  Besides, I wouldn’t be done.  It will take two trips to town.

       I was faced with removing the auger from the bin, putting everything away, and starting all over again another day.  The elevator keeps no Saturday hours this time of year.  The weather is predicted to take a nasty turn for the weekend.  I really didn’t want a truckload of wheat sitting in the shed for who knows how long.  Remember that vision of a blizzard roaring down the plain?

    So I used the remaining afternoon to put everything away.  Next time it will be easier to get everything running because I know it can be done.  Well, unless I have to pull that Lawson flywheel again.  JB Weld can be pretty strong.

      Maybe I’ll take what’s left to the farmer’s market.  Let’s see, about 800 bushels equals 48,000 pounds, about 4,800 ten pound bags.  The old Dakota pickup can haul about . . . .

                   

             

The Willie Suchanek Lawson Engine

     “How do I start this thing?”

     “Insert the knot of the starter rope into the notch in that flywheel pulley.  Wrap the rope around the pulley three or four times, hold the choke wire in full-on position with one hand while you pull the rope with the other hand.”

     “No, no, no, not the engine.  That’s not what I meant at all.  This story, how do I start this story?”

      It’s is fitting and proper that this story is as hard to start as the little Lawson engine can be.  This began as a story about hauling wheat.  Like the road to heaven, tempting diversions spring up everywhere.  I seem to follow Yogi Berra’s sage advice, “when you see a fork in the road, take it.”   So, here goes.

     Life didn’t begin at birth.  Life began when the conscious memory began to create and store images.  I’m told that I badly burned my feet as a toddler by walking onto the floor furnace grate.  I was a patient in Children’s Hospital.  I have absolutely no memory of that.  (Woops, another sidetrack.) I was still more vegetable than animal then.

     There are things about the farmyard that go back to the beginning of my life:  An old red barn, two red chicken houses, a hog house (the cement floor survives), a wind charger on a three-legged tower, a tank house (right where the current pump house sits), the shop and milk house (pretty much unchanged in appearance except for the plastic siding and metal roof), the red granary a few hundred yards north of the farmyard.

     The old grain auger belongs in that list.  Like the sun, moon, and stars, it pre-existed me.  It was always there.

    

  Back in the forties or fifties, Dad and Willie Suchanek bought nearly identical set-ups, sixteen foot augers with Lawson engines.  Picture the rear axle of a rear-drive vehicle, the wheels on either end, a differential in the center with a drive shaft protruding forward.  Replace the drive shaft with about a one-and-a-half inch galvanized pipe about ten feet long, the galvanizing so old it has turned blue, used as a hitch to pull the machine behind a vehicle.  Back to the differential, place about a two-and-half inch pipe coming out of the differential vertically at a right angle to the drawbar. 

     Inside the vertical pipe was a slightly smaller pipe that could be raised or lowered by a crank and cable device.  On top of the vertical pipe was a healthy piece of square tube forming a tee with the movable pipe.  On one side of the square tube, the six inch auger was strapped.  On the other side of the tee branch was a metal frame used to secure the Lawson engine.  When you turned the cable crank, the auger, engine and all rose up. You needed a ladder to service the engine.

    A long belt ran from the pulley on the motor’s drive shaft to the top of the auger.  The drive pulley was on the top of the shaft that held the auger flights.  That pulley was at right angle to the engine pulley, so two angled idler pulleys directed the belt around the corner.

     There was one difference between our auger and Willie’s auger.  Our Lawson had a small pulley on the drive shaft to run the belt.  Willie thought that would run too fast, so he had a gear reduction boxed mounted on the end of his drive shaft.  He found that he had to put a much bigger pulley on the gear box shaft to get the auger up to speed.  Hmmm.

      There was another downside of the gear box addition—the gear reduction also reversed the shaft rotation.  If you used Willie’s engine to replace a normal engine, you had to figure a way of placing the engine so that the drive belt would go the right direction.  See? (Willie would have said.)    

     We had a lot of trouble with grasshoppers in the fifties and sixties.  They would eat the wheat into nothingness.  We had a poison spreader that was a 50-gallon drum with a ground driven whirligig beneath it.  You put poison bait in the drum and pulled the machine behind the pickup.  An adjustable gate in the bottom of the drum let the poison grain fall on the whirligig.  You hoped the grasshoppers found the bait before they found the emerging wheat seedlings.  It was usually a fall chore to keep the grasshoppers from devouring newly-planted wheat. 

    One year the hoppers were bad in spring and early summer, so bad Dad hired Nelson Stake to fly his Piper Cub over the headed-out wheat.  The hoppers would bite the wheat stem in two, letting the immature wheat head fall uselessly to the ground.  Nelson’s Cub had a barrel full of chemical where the back seat should have been.  Spray booms were attached to the wings.  It took two or three fills to spray 160 acres. 

     Dad and I “flagged” for Nelson.  We stood at the west end of the field until the Cub got lined up on us.  Then we took 15 or 16 steps north, getting out of the way of the low-flying plane, and waited for the plane to turn around and line up on us from the other direction.  Then we took another 15 or 16 steps.

      Nelson instructed Dad in the art of flagging on the telephone. We never saw the man except for glimpses of him as the plane flew by. 

      What was the chemical he sprayed, Aldrin?  DDT?  I don’t remember, but to think we stood out there within 45 feet of the plane spewing the poison seems unimaginable today.  They routinely used diesel fuel as part of the “carrier” for the chemical in those days because diesel stuck to the plants (and us?) and prolonged the chemical activity.  I doubt we took a bath or changed clothes right after we finished spraying.

     Ground rig sprayers came into use.  I remember Dad trying to build his own sprayer by using an auto engine oil pump.  It didn’t work, so one year we rented a spray rig from Ed Hock at Simpson and Company Elevator.  

     Willie had bought a small sprayer that had a belt driven pump mounted on a steel frame with a place for a gas motor.  Willie’s Lawson auger engine wouldn’t work because if you put it on the frame where it was supposed to go, it turned the pump the wrong way.

     The one and only time Willie used the sprayer, he borrowed our Lawson engine, identical to his except for the reversing gear reduction box, or he borrowed one from his hired man Lawrence Andersen.  Willie and Lawrence (L.M.) set out to spray DDT on the grasshoppers. 

     They mounted the sprayer and a 50-gallon drum in the back of Willie’s Dodge pickup.  Willie had a twelve foot pipe “boom” with an assortment of nozzles on the end.  The idea was to extend the boom away from the pickup far enough to avoid the drift.  But apparently it didn’t work. 

     Willie got a face full of spray drift as did L.M.  Willie rinsed off in the stock tank.  L.M. didn’t bother.  The next day, L.M.’s face puffed up and he was out of action for a day or two.  Willie was okay, but he never wanted anything to do with that spray rig after that.  He gave it to us.  In exchange, we sprayed his grasshoppers a few time over the years.  

    Willie’s auger must have gone out of use about that time, because somehow, the Lawson engine came along with the sprayer.   Our Lawson engine suffered another fate.

      Sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, Dad bought a new Mayrath auger from Snell grain in Genoa.  It was longer than the old auger and the Lawson wasn’t big enough to pull it.  So we got a nine horse Briggs and Stratton engine to run the new auger. 

     The Lawson became the center piece of many attempts to build a gocart (yet another fork in the road).  I think it may have been subject to an overhaul attempt too.  It ended its life in  pieces, some of which still remain in a junk pile on the farm. 

    With the demise of our Lawson, Willie’s engine had to be adapted to the sprayer, a machine I used into the 80’s as a sprayer and even later as a fire-fighting machine to take to the harvest field.  Uncle Ricky may have been in on the adaptation.  Angle irons welded to the original sprayer frame allowed the Willie engine to sit to the side of the sprayer pump and thus turn the pump the right direction. 

     I mounted the pump and engine on an old trailer Dad used to carry a welder engine.  He tried to use old combine engines that never would start.  He eventually bought a 220 volt Montgomery Ward welder and abandoned the trailer.  I bought a 150 gallon poly tank and mounted it on the trailer.  I still use tank and trailer to water trees.  Gravity flow works for that job, no engine power needed.  But the Lawson remained a part of the water tank trailer.  Thus it spends most of the year in a shed out of the weather.

    Willie’s Lawson engine got returned to auger duty when we put up the new grain bin.  When we ran the cement for the granary floor, we formed a channel in the floor of the bin that would accommodate a six inch auger.  We covered the channel with iron plate.  At the end of the channel in the center of the bin, a metal slide works as a gate to control the flow of grain.  

     I attached Willie’s Lawson motor to the end of a sixteen foot auger that slides into the channel under the granary floor.  It has plenty of horsepower for that job, as the grain only moves horizontally and isn’t elevated.  The old Mayrath with Briggs and Stratton engine does the elevating job.

     So now you know the story of the Willie Suchanek Lawson engine.  As the other nearly-identical Lawson engine was always a part of the farm in my memory, the Willie engine must be as old as our old Lawson, as old as I am, and still running.

 Now I can tell the story I set out to tell, about hauling wheat in December.

New House Update

      It is December.  We have had six weeks of thatching our burrow.  We’re not done yet, but here is a progress report.

 

    Not quite enough stuff yet.  Stay tuned.

     The piano waits patiently to vacate the now-cluttered garage and move into the music room.

    The television got replaced by the “new” antique step cabinet.  Looks like the books might have to go to make way for the tv.  Sounds like a familiar story.

     There are a few cardboard boxes to be emptied.  Where will all that stuff go?  We really had all that?

     Meanwhile, out of doors. . . .  I brought the chainsaw the last time I returned from the farm.  I went out Monday to do some serious tree trimming and removing unwanted volunteer saplings (upstart Aspens?  Not sure).  No chainsaw gas or chain oil.  Don’t blame me.  They weren’t on the list of stuff to bring from the farm.  Who made the list?  I shall do so another time, said Jack. 

     So, I fell to with the loppers. The trees’ reprieve was the shrubs’ expedited executuion.

 

   

  

   Healthful, invigorating trim, or butchery?  Idle hands shouldn’t get ahold of tools?

    The idea is trim now and avoid the spring rush.  It may backfire.  Spring may find me removing dead plants and planting new ones.

    

   One load of rose vines, juniper branches and whatever else has already gone to the recycle center.  Some pine branches have been held back in case Someone wants to make wreaths and other holiday niceys.