I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely ...

Worker tops pine hanging over my house.

Don't look now, but there's a man hanging out in my backyard. He's found a way to get up in the world, a job that you couldn't pay me enough to ever think about doing.

The guy was part of a package deal, one of a half-dozen or so workers who spent the day taking down a half-dozen or so pines hanging dangerously over my house.

Once upon a time, I was thrilled by the shade and greenery offered up by the trees. But after 30 years of growth -- where did the time go? -- I find myself holding my breath whenever the wind starts blowing and the trees start swaying.

Which brings me back to the guy in the tree. He cut his way up, trimming off branches until he managed to top the last 10 feet. After swaying about a bit he proceeded to work his way down, cutting off huge blocks of the trunk until there was none.

And then he did it again and again and again and, well, yet again.

The good news is that now, when local meteorologists start hyperventilating whenever the sky grows dark and the wind starts howling, I feel relatively safe in my comfy little home. Let them rant on with all that high-tech gear they now have at hand, offering up dire warnings of what can be expected when a low front out of the northwest slams up against a ridge of high pressure speeding in from the southeast.

It's just a bit of sound and fury, signifying, well, nothing.

And now for the  bad news. There are still a dozen or so towering pines in my yard; a benign grove of nature's bounty when all is calm, a menacing presence when the skies and my mind grow cloudy.

Do I think kablooey or just say phooey to the whims of fate? Should I simply hunker down and hope Mother Nature and karma are with me when clouds blanket my little corner of the world?

BTW, did I mention all this inner sturm und drang began when a 90-foot-pine came crashing down a few months ago, falling deep in my backyard into my next door neighbor's yard. Oh, and a few weeks later a second tree -- another pine, just as big -- fell into a second neighbor's yard.

The good news -- and, yes, there is good news here -- no one was injured and there was minimal property damage.

Meanwhile, I am now wondering -- and here, finally, is the point of this blog -- since no one was around when the trees toppled, did they actually make a sound when they crashed to earth?