View from the North 40: How can I help you? Or not

To be fair, my husband and I both knew it was just a courtesy when I offered to run to town with him to help find and fill out some paperwork because I’m about as attentive and effective at paperwork as the average 5-year-old asked to clean his bedroom.

I stayed home to tackle something that suited my skill set: Clearing out a good-sized grove of dead chokecherry trees and saplings. Nothing like a good ol’ mindless physical task to give you time to reflect on your personal history of helpfulness.

Like the time I was helping a friend who was remodeling her old farm house, and I was given the task of rasping off a high spot in the rough opening for a new window while my friend worked outside below me on the siding. The rasp caught on a small knot in the wood and spun out of my hands. I yelled my friend’s name so she’d duck out of the way, while simultaneously making a grab for the tool in mid-air.

Some things become clear after the fact, like how yelling someone’s name causes them to look at you rather than look away, and how reaching for a flying object too quickly just turns your arm into a baseball bat of sorts, which increases the speed of the flying object.

So, yeah, my friend looked up just in time for the rasp to smack her in the bridge of her nose — don’t worry, though, the lenses on her brand new glasses saved her from the rasp cutting up anything else on her face.

I don’t think she found as much consolation in that as I did.

But I haven’t helped only humans.

My father-in-law killed off a thick patch of wild roses along a 100-yard embankment once, thinking it was a good thing to get them off the fenceline that ran the full length down the middle of that rose bush patch.

Yes, it was easier to get to the fence for repairs, but because wild roses are my favorite flower in the entire world, I was mortified. Determined to ensure the longevity of my other large patch of wild roses — I set about pruning dead limbs and clearing out the old leaf debris around the bushes.

Thanks to all my work, the patch of roses half died over the winter and took at least five years to recover. Wild things, apparently, like to be left to their wild ways, no help needed. Point taken.

I’ll just take to spraying the weeds, I decided, since I’m so good at killing and maiming things.

Honestly, I couldn’t have grown healthier, larger, more lush weeds if I’d put fertilizer in the sprayer. I even checked and double-checked that it was weed spray and I had applied it correctly, then bought a scythe and whacked them down manually — an exercise akin to paying penance.

Then came the year I had hordes of tent caterpillars overtaking my chokecherry trees with their thick mats of webbing and their ravenous ways stripping leaves from the trees, leaving the branches to die by the following spring.

I cut off and burned the twigs and branches that were wrapped in web on the smaller trees, but some trees were too tall or the groves of trees were too thick to reach all the branches, so reluctantly — very reluctantly — I dusted off the sprayer, triple scrubbed it, and mixed up a batch of specific bug spray according to all directions.

Not wanting to contaminate all the fruit or hurt the other insects I carefully sprayed only the tent caterpillar nests in two lush chokecherry groves, a small tree on a bank and one magnificent large tree.

The caterpillars died.

Then the branches I sprayed died.

And in the next five years the choke cherries all died — except for the glorious large chokecherry tree. It’s going to take a good 15 years to fully wither away and die.

So I’m pretty ambivalent about offering help these days. Sure I haven’t talked about the times my help has, well, actually helped — like how that falling rasp cut an age spot of my fair-skinned friends’ nose, saving her thousands of dollars for plastic surgery that she never would have had.

I was just happy to find, as I cleared away the dead trees that a bio-diverse grove of currants, gooseberries, honeysuckle and red dogwood have joined a few surviving chokecherry trees.

Clearing out the dead trees was the right thing. I’ve made the little saplings no promises, though.

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For the record, “triple rinse” doesn’t mean cleansed of all contamination at [email protected] .