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I'm feeling sick tonight.

I'm feeling sick tonight. Not physically though. I had a local guy trim some parasitic vines out of the huge ficus tree beside the house. Did a great job. But near the end he asked for a machete. OK, no problem. Then as I was leaving the house to go to the hangar, I saw him hitting around the base of a dead tree next to the ficus tree. It's a tree with many orchids and other plants growing on the trunk and several branches. I thought he was just getting rid of a vine or something like that. When I returned from the hangar a short while later, it was to the creak and crash of a falling tree! It was a beautiful tree, and one that we saw right outside our dining room window. It added a lot of character to the view.

When I think about it, I can hardly blame Jorge. He was just cleaning up the tree like I asked him to, and this dead tree was part of the problem. The bad vine was moving across from the dead tree into the ficus tree. To him it was just an old dead tree. To us it was part of the view from the house. Jorge lives in a little 'shack' that makes our house look like a huge mansion. Our perspectives are so different. But Ellyn and I are left mourning the loss of an old dead tree.