Stihl Yard Boss

Rutledge: Mean Irene takes old tire swing

When my dad moved our family to a small farm with an unheated house and a big wood stove, I was a teenager and less than overjoyed about leaving the city life. Soon after the move, Dad drove up to that drafty old house in a 1970 Chevy pickup for me to drive.

When I asked what I'd done to deserve such a wonderful gift, Dad said, “Nothing yet,” and handed me a new Stihl 041 Farm Boss chain saw.

I spent that first summer on the farm learning to handle a heavy saw — and severely underestimating how much wood is required to heat a 100-year-old house with high ceilings and no insulation.

I vowed I would never again have to cut firewood in the snow, and that any house of mine would not be heated by a wood stove.

Hurricane Irene has changed my feelings about wood stoves. Most of our oak trees fell during the storm and our electric bills were pretty high last winter.

I'm not ordinarily the tree-hugger type, but those old trees were practically members of the family.

As I was clearing limbs from the once-mighty oak that grew nearest the garage, I found what was left of the rope from a tire swing our home's previous owner left behind.

I cut the tire down years ago after the rope had begun to fray just under the knot that held it to a limb about 20 feet up. My three daughters finally stopped asking when I was going to put the tire swing back up.

Probably what caused the rope to fray was the way the girls would hang in the tire on their bellies and run around in circles to wind up the rope. After it had kinked up enough to keep them from gaining traction, they'd pull up their feet and spin themselves silly.

When the girls were little, their game was for me to pull them back as far as I could toward the garage and then let them fly out over the yard toward the big oak by the driveway. If they couldn't touch the leaves of that tree with their feet on the upswing, Daddy was accused of falling down on the job.

Boss, Richard J. Daley of Chicago

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