My Hero (sigh…)!!

My mother in law decided about a year ago that she was going to put in a shed in the backyard to store some extra stuff that no longer fits in the house. These are mostly papers and things she hasn’t gone through from her mother’s house. She died about two years ago and there was a lot of stuff, so it’s quite the project. That was a year ago.

She finally convinced my father in law to do it and Dave went to work on it a couple of weeks ago. Of course, putting in a shed is a lot more work than just buying one at Home Depot, apparently. I didn’t know this, but you have to relocate sandboxes, move sprinkler pipes/heads, pour a concrete base (and while you’re at it, why not make a little patio, says Mother in Law? Ok… here we go..)

This project has been going on for a couple of weeks. Yesterday David took me outside to show me his progress and he complained about how “the peach tree looks sad”. I wondered why, and then he pointed out that he was instructed to remove the tree from the yard to make room for the shed or patio, or something equally unimportant.

Yes, you heard that right. My husband. MY. HUSBAND. KILLED. A. TREE.

I will not stand for this. It is my duty to speak up for those that cannot speak for themselves, like trees, small animals, and occasionally animal-shaped pinatas. (Interesting story, are you interested? I will relate it.) I declared that we would not just let the peach tree die and even though it was already out of the ground, we would replant it and try our best to keep it alive. David looked at me with that look on his face… the one he gets when he thinks I’m being unreasonable, but he knows that I will not change my mind.

He told me he’d fought for the tree. He said he’d told his dad it was murder (way to go Dave!) and that we should relocate it. But there really are lots of tress in the yard already and we didn’t have room. I thought we should plant it in the backyard of a house that’s been for sale for about two years. It’d make the house prettier and the owners wouldn’t notice for months… we could take care of it ourselves since it’s two houses away. It was depressing and the tree did not want to live there. After that we took a giant garbage can from my sister in law’s house (with permission) and were going to put the tree in there until next year, when we would hopefully have a better home for it. It was a terrible option, but David had already asked the neighbors that were home if they would take it. (See? He’s a good guy.)

We have some neighbors who are pretty great. We saw them drive up and I instantly knew they would take the tree. We ran to their house and asked them, and they did! They took the tree in that very instant. When I told them that my husband had murdered a peach tree they were appalled. Let’s call them JS and LS. JS and Dave dug a hole and had the tree in there within about 15 minutes of accepting it. The little tree was out of the ground for a while, but it just seemed like it wanted to live. It doesn’t have very good chances, but we had to try. LS gave me full visitation rights and said I didn’t even have to wait until they were home to visit. She’s a pretty awesome neighbor.

And the hero of the title is my husband, because even though he murdered a tree, he did help make it right in a very speedy manner. And he didn’t call me crazy.