The day after Christmas, we discovered a giant spruce tree leaning toward the corner of our house.

A little wind and crash! The tree would have gouged a sky light into our bedroom!

To make matters more interesting: The spruce inclined within inches of a metal storage shed. The tree couldn’t be felled without flattening the shed.

It took three of us to finagle a method to safely bring the old spruce down without damaging shed and house. The temperature was minus 2 degrees.

With a double snatch-block and several hundred feet of cable, we pulled the inclining tree with a 4×4 pickup, inch-by-inch, past the metal building. We had planned to cut it with a chainsaw… but the frozen trunk SNAPPED like a massive toothpick, and settled into a corridor we had cleared.

Thank you, Lord, for sending two hardy, insightful men—my son, Tom, and his visiting father-in-law, Scott—who helped save my house from a New Year’s disaster.

And thanks, too, for the hot beans and ham, Sweetie…