Dead wood

Dad came over today to help us get rid of a tree. There has been this old plum-looking thing, with lots of thin branches that go straight up, sort of just sitting there at the bottom of the garden path and just being dead. You could just tell by its general nakedness leafwise and blackened bark that had we taken the wait-and-see approach it would have looked just as dead next spring as it has all this summer. So, my pa being the proud owner of a chainsaw (an electric one, bless him), was only too happy to come and get some exercise in the front yard because it meant he'd have a nice pile of logs to take home for his combustion heater. (I was going to say for his pot belly but no, he puts beer in that.) The chainsaw, as I said, is electric. Hmm. It just seems somehow wrong that anything with sharp, rotating metal bits should really be in the vicinity of a live power lead. But it's really only a pruning chainsaw. I think it's a 6" model, which is just huge, really, so it couldn't really go through the trunk of the tree but was just able to... I don't know... amputate its limbs. So we're left with this 3' or 4' high dead tree trunk with sawn-off branches sticking out at all sorts of angles. It actually looks rather fetching, in a kind of anti-tree way, as if it's saying 'you'd expect there to be a tree here but no, I'm not a tree, I'm just a chunk of dead wood and I have as much right to be here as, say, that letterbox over there cos that's made of dead wood too'. So what I'm thinking is that I might just get me a little hatchet, strip off all the bark, sand it back till it's baby-arse smooth and lacquer the whole bloody thing. It could stand as many statues do, remembering the dead personage they resemble. And I might even bolt the letterbox on top of it as a finishing touch.