A Tough Job Done

I'm an apple a day girl and I've got this fantasy that my garden might one day produce bountiful harvests each fall of apples and peaches and lemons and figs. So a few years ago, I bought a self-pollinating golden delicious and I planted it on a sloping bank in place of a crab apple tree that had been destroyed when a part of my neighbor's tulip tree blew down in a storm. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, the crab apple recovered and in a few years it outdistanced the rate of growth of the apple tree and last summer, the poor apple tree, so stressed, started to fall over. I tied it to the crab tree and vowed to transplant it.

Well, the job needed strength and I should have surely hired someone to do it, but yesterday afternoon, I did it myself. The tree will one day thank me--if it survived the fairly harsh circumstances in which I yanked it and tugged it and dragged it. But once I wrestled it up the hill and into its new home, right next to the forsythia bush and on level ground, I imagined it was already giving me high approval ratings. The Putterer