Delimbing, debranching, disjointing, disarming—he grinned—at least sawing them into manageable lengths; he surveyed with satisfaction the mess he had made. “Get ’em before the sap rises,” his neighbor Hal Mitchum had advised, “and you can burn the wood come fall.” They were old, tired trees that yielded too little to stay and caught every disease known to the apple kingdom, and worse, they threatened the well-being of the half dozen new ones he and Constance had planted. He had gotten them before the sap rose, and then rain and snow had alternated week after week and Constance had said, “Charlie, you can’t just leave them all spring, all summer. They’ll be covered with brambles and weeds the day after spring comes. And you can’t drag them out after the daffodils are up,” she added in a way that warned she meant it. She had planted the daffodils and probably knew where each one was, when it was due. “Why don’t you just hire someone to come in, do the job, clean up, and be done with it?”
