Lightening Struck

Our Memorial Day project was to bring down our newly, dead tree.... It was a huge, old tree and last Fall, Jake and I were worried that it was not losing all if it's leaves, even though the leaves were dead. We hoped the tree was just under stress from our extreme hot and dry summer, but Spring came, and the tree never turned green. Finally, we began to blame ourselves for killing such an old tree in less than 2 years, but what could we do? Watering is overrated, right? Then Jake was talking with our neighbor who mentioned these trees have main "arteries" of sap, just like humans have main arteries, and we had a branch break by Mother Nature last summer. Well, Jake couldn't let it just hang up there, so he cut it off and our theory was Mother Nature broke the branch and Jake didn't know it may have been "the artery" when cutting it down..... So we inadvertently killed it. Fast forward to today, our kind neighbor owns a scissor lift and chain saw, and nicely helped cut down our eye sore of a tree, only to find evidence that lightning struck it and fried a section and more than likely killed it. This makes sense, because that section died off before the rest of the tree last year. At least now Jake and I aren't tree killers... Mother Nature is. We can sleep well tonight. Now we have this fun stump to dig out one of these days.