Do chainsaws also come from Mars?

June 16, 2008 – 7:57 pm |

I try to avoid gender generalizations, but, sometimes, I observe things about men that I don’t understand.

Like their thing with power tools.

By 8:30 on a sunny Father’s Day morning, my husband had been to Home Depot, purchased a chainsaw and returned, and the men on my street had gathered in my front yard.  They’d flocked over one-by-one as though answering to some magnetic force calling them to respond.

During a powerful thunderstorm the night before, a strong, straight wind had blown down a leafy shade tree, ripping it out of the ground at the root. (We believe it was the wind despite eyewitness insistence by 3yob that it was either a big monster or possibly the tooth fairy).

Across the street a small tree lay snapped in half at two feet up its trunk. Next door a large pine, still connected to the ground, leaned precariously over a driveway. Our tree was the largest tree, though, and our yard a central location in observing neighborhood damage. Families out for Sunday morning storm surveys drove slowly by, snapping an occasional picture.

And, so, on this bright and dewy morning on the day of the family barbecue, several neighborhood fathers were circled around the stump in my yard, coffee cups in hand, analyzing the trees and contemplating removal.

“Yeah, you’re definitely going to need a chainsaw for this,” remarked one neighbor, a hint of envy in his voice. “Do you have a chainsaw?”

“I just picked one up this morning,” replied my husband. I had begun to notice that Hubs, while genuinely disappointed about losing the tree, seemed to be emanating a strange level of excitement.

“Oh, you could have borrowed one of mine,” said another neighbor, who delicately added with a combination of shy embarrassment and subtle swagger, “I actually have three.”

You could feel the admiration of the group well-up, “Wow, three chainsaws.”

“Yeah, last year for my birthday I bought myself a Steel.”

I didn’t know what a “Steel” was (in fact I didn’t learn until I googled it, that it’s actually a “Stihl”), but judging by the reaction from the group (congratulatory gasps and utterances of justification, things like “Oh, yeah, you deserve it! Good for you!”-statements I didn’t know men made to each other), I suspected that this might be like me telling my book club I’d splurged on Seven jeans or bought my little black dress from Vera Wang.

“You know,” continued the Stihl-owning neighbor reflectively, taking a sip of his coffee, “if you cut it up into small enough pieces you could use this for firewood next winter.”

The rest of the conversation got a little blurry as I imagined my favorite tree chunked up and tossed into the fireplace – a tree my children had climbed, that shaded their picnics and provided privacy and sun-protection to their bedroom windows. The pit in my stomach reminded me of the day I realized that the bacon on my breakfast plate was actually a pig named Bubbles whom I’d been feeding since his infancy.  I don’t disagree with the use – for the pig or the tree – but it seemed a little wrong to dive right in without even a little mourning.

A few minutes later the group disbanded and the neighborhood became a harmony of chainsaw noise. But before the cutting began, 5 and I grabbed our cameras. “It’s too bad about our tree,” she said.