Mono Monday : : Stone (Reprise)

Stone was an easy choice for today's Mono Monday challenge. Thank you Nikkimags888.It is so hard to dig a hole in our garden that OilMan has started saying we should use stones instead of plants because they're there anyway and we don't have to water them.

We got Ozzie out for an early walk because the tree trimmers were coming. With all the bad weather we have had this year, the tree guys are very busy and we have been waiting for them since a tree fell in January.  OilMan was convinced that they would show up and leave if he wasn't at home...or not show up at all.

Our neighbors' chickens had been liberated from their coop into the large yard around it when we walked by. The stones that these hens are standing on probably came out of the ground. Rather than saying we have a lot of rocks in our soil, I probably should be saying we have a little bit of soil in our rocks. Everyone who lives around here has rock piles somewhere either as part of their landscaping, or just because they came out of the ground and are damn difficult to get rid of....

I took lots of pictures of the tree trimmers running nimbly around the branches, but by the time they came it had started raining, and the light was bad. The guys loved that I was taking their pictures. One of them standing on a branch 25 feet above the ground even turned around and grinned at the camera. Cold and wet, I gave up after just a few minutes but they carried on, unphased by the rain laughing and joking with each other in Spanish. 

A typical tree crew seems to consist of three people...one to do the high level work, one to belay him and one to gather up all the branches, drag them up the hill through the gate and into the field where their truck with a chipper was parked. Before they left, all three of them were clambering around the hill picking leaves out of the spiky plants. By the time they left for the day, they had created a pile of mulch as tall as a man. They are scheduled for three days so I'm glad we have a big empty field for their trucks and the piles of wood and mulch from the chipper. If we didn't have it, they would probably have to bring in a crane.

By the time they get to the level of the house, they will undoubtedly be cutting off some of the interwoven branches we like to call the 'squirrel highway'.