Surprise

There is no surprise like the one you receive when you come home from an overnight trip and discover that your neighbor has cut down your olive tree.  Yep, that's right.  Felled it right there in the front yard.  See:

  Okay, I hate to take away from the shock value here, but the truth is that Jason had previously talked to Neighbor Bob about how this particular tree was ailing and probably just needed to come down.  N.B. had a suggestion of another type of tree to put there, and said he would help cut it down with his handy dandy chain saw. 

And he did.  Here are some more shots of the tree  our new firewood:

I do kind of wonder if any of the other neighbors thought this was strange that N.B. was chopping down a tree that didn't belong to him.  Did they worry about this, or did they just commiserate that he was sick and tired of all of those olive carcasses falling on his shiny red truck.  (Actually, our olive trees didn't product last year, but the neighbors might not know this.)  Did someone think about performing a chainsaw intervention, or did they just give Bob the benefit of the doubt?  Either way, the tree is down.

Do you notice how the tops of the trees resemble big olive-y tumbleweeds?  As if a big (BIG) wind came along they would just roll away down the street.  (I can just hear it now - "Driftin' along...with the olive-y tumbleweeds...".)  Which would not be a bad thing, because we only have one trashcan for compost materials, and it's going to take a lot of chopping to fit all of these tree pieces in it.

You can see from this picture that the tree was indeed ailing.  So it really needed to come down.  I suppose in the green view of things, I do hate to cut down a tree.

Then again, at the same time I am recognizing in myself a true and deep bitterness toward these pom pom olive trees, because one of my first thoughts after I realized what had happened was, "Ah ha, you poodle-ish trees.  Serves you right for being in such an odd shape."  Which is perhaps something I will need to discuss with my tree-therapist one day.

But in the meantime, we will plant a new, beautiful, leafy tree in its place.  One that we will not prune.  Ever.