Pouring My Art Out

Okay, I hear you asking, why are we looking at a bunch of firewood and some clippers and an electric chainsaw on a picnic table, exactly? Well, I warned you, in an earlier post, that we were going to talk about a view… or lack thereof… and why I am at my mom’s house in the Bay Area again so soon.

Well, a lot of it has to do with this splendid old oak tree… which was a small thing when I was little… which, I guess, means I am old too.

To put that tree into perspective, there it is from the street view. That house, on the left of the tree, is the house where I grew up. And the deck you can sort of see, is where I take a lot of the photos of the sunsets I always show you. Now, look at the wires in front of the tree.

So, it is bad enough that this tree is now growing around the phone and power lines going to my mom’s house and our neighbor’s house, but it is even growing around the ones way out above the street now.

So my brother and I… that’s the one that lives with my mom to help her out… are trying to remove some of the tree before we spend thousands of dollars letting professional tree trimmers finish the job. You can also see, in the photo above, the huge redwood tree, to the left, that we used to climb when we were crazy little kids.

Anyway, back to the oak tree… When you are way up in those branches, trying to cut other branches off, all without falling to your death or getting electrocuted by the power lines, it is scary. We also can’t afford to drop huge branches that might bring the wires down with them.

I have mixed feelings about all this. I love the tree, and we are going to try to save it. On the other hand, as you can see by this photo taken out of the window of my mother’s living room, and showing part of the deck, it does block the view quite a bit.

There is another photo, taken from the corner of the deck… which, if you bear with me for a moment, may look vaguely familiar to you. The tree, as you can see, is in the way. Notice the huge Cecil Brunner rose bush growing in the branches. Let me change the angle just a little bit…

That, right there, is the view I usually use for my sunset pictures from my mom’s house, unless I go into the backyard, which isn’t much better, when I am too lazy or busy to drive or walk somewhere with a better view. This is where the wires come in. They are in the way too. So I put the zoom lens on, and shoot under the wires…

I also, if I want to mix it up, can shoot under the wires, over the roof across the street, and past the oak tree.

This is what it looks like, if I am not zoomed all the way in. I hope this has cleared things up for you. If you are interested, I could put that photo in Photoshop, and remove the wires. I did that once, in a post, long ago.

Let me know if that sounds fun.

This will also prove to me who reads the words all the way through.

HA!