The first picture, taken a couple of years ago, is of the large Southern Pine in our backyard. It's a nice looking, nicely shaped tree, but there are a couple of problems with it. First it dumps billions of pine needles on the lawn all year long. And on our house and our neighbor's house. And in the rain gutters, which clog regularly because of that. The second problem is that the tree is close to our house. You can see the corner of our house in the far right part of that first picture. That's where our bedroom is. We get big storms occasionally here in Huntsville, and I've worried for some time about that tree being knocked down and falling right into our bedroom while we were sleeping.

So I hired the guy in the picture on the right. He, along with his son and two other kids, spent the entire day last Tuesday taking down that tree, one limb at a time. Once all of the branches were removed, they started at the top of the tree taking down the trunk in 1-foot sections. By the time I got home from work, only the stump remained, and there were four really worn out guys cleaning up the yard. The stump, shown in the center of the bottom picture, measues 30 inches in diameter. There's still a lot of cleanup to be done, but as the storm season approaches, I feel better for not having that tree in the yard.