The start of every fall, we pick a portion of our property to clean up. This year, the horse pasture was the lucky recipient of the yearly clean up. A couple of years ago, pine beetles got into almost all of the pine trees around our house, and if any of you live in the south, you know that pine trees are the major make up of many yards. Well, pine beetles are horrendous little buggers that do A LOT of damage in a very short time. Last summer, the heavily damaged trees started falling like dominoes. It was to dangerous for any of us to go to far into the horse pasture. None of us wanted the headlines to read, Southerner Bludgeoned To Death By Falling Pine Tree, so we decided to give it until this fall to clean up. Most all of the trees that were gonna fall have already done so and even if one does fall now we have a lot more room to maneuver out of the way.

Anyways, starting Saturday afternoon, we got started. By 3 p.m. we had hauled out 3 extremely large truckloads of dead trees. Now anyone who knows me, knows I'm a pyromaniac, a firebug, a lover of gigantic, roaring bonfires. Truckloads of dead trees sounds like the making of a wonderful evening, to me. When we build fires at my house, they burn for a couple of days. We stacked up our initial burn pile and got it going.