My shorts have tears, and my knees aren’t the only thing scraped. It’s always the same story when I take on the Leyland Cypress trees that provide lovely and complete privacy at our balcony. Privacy that comes with a cost, for just trimming three trees is more than an afternoon affair.

Every few years, though, I decide that enough is enough, that it’s time to teach these trees a lesson they’ll never forget. To strip them almost bald. To take a couple of feet off the side and four off the top.

And that’s no easy task, because these things have trunks that are inches — multiple inches — in diameter. And I’m standing on a ladder that’s balanced on some limbs that I’ve crushed into semi-submission, standing on this ladder and jerking my arm back and forth and back and forth. The whole tree sways; the whole ladder sways. Back and forth and back and forth. I think about a chain saw. I think again. Back and forth.

Finally, I’m through. I take the freshly removed log, steady myself, and toss it over the side. I hear the crunch of busted plastic. “Hum, there was that white plastic deck chair somewhere near the tree,” I think. “Near the tree, but not that near.

But it wasn’t the deck chair. It was the spool I use to store the ridiculously long drop cord I have to use for such adventures. There is a tolerance of perhaps two inches — it fit perfectly.

How many times would I have had to chuck a log from a ladder blindly over a tree to hit that again?