Alas, poor Bradford! I knew him well.

So I'm heading home for small group last night, and as I turn onto our street, I can immediately sense that something's not right. It looks like a tree is eating my lawn. And the branches are going in the wrong direction. As my eyes followed the branches back to their point of origin, I realized what had happened. The large Bradford Pear tree in our front yard had split, and about 40% of it was now laying on the lawn, extending all the way to the street.

While the sight was somewhat shocking, the fact that our tree bit the dust was not. Our tree, which I would assume to be about 15 years old like our house, had gotten huge. It was the largest of its kind in our neighborhood, and over the last few years it had become far too large to effectively trim by myself. It had also grown to where it was about 30 feet tall, but probably 40 feet wide. You see these things split all the time, particularly in the winter after an ice storm, when the weight of all the outstretched branches become too much for the trunk to bear. We had a big storm on Tuesday night, with lots of rain and wind (even a Tornado warning and some hail). I imagine it was weakened by the heavy winds and finally cracked under the strain on Wednesday. The weird thing is, we didn't hear it break. You'd think we would have, given that the part that broke was probably a foot in diameter.

I'm definitely bummed that the tree broke. For one thing, of the four trees visible in our front yard, that was the one that I didn't want to get rid of. It was nice looking and its branches were high enough off the ground that it didn't pose a problem when mowing the lawn. Andrew is very disappointed, because that was his climbing tree. He was even a little worried that his climbing might have been the cause. Given that he weighs all of 38 pounds, I highly doubt that.

Now we need to figure out: (a) how to get rid of the part that has fallen, (b) what to do about the part that remains, and (c) where Andrew is going to do his tree-climbing now, and (d) how to pay for (a) and (b). Actually, (a) might not be that bad. I'll borrow a couple of chainsaws and enlist the guys in my small group, and we'll hack it down to manageable pieces. That could even potentially be fun.

Goodbye, fair tree. We knew ye well.