The back yard is filled with several mature trees and that is one reason why I was drawn to purchase this place. Although the lawn isn't in such great shape, competing for sun and water, the tree limbs reach over the roofs and create a mottled sanctuary underneath.

One tree has not been doing so well. An entire hemisphere had been dead so long the bark had fallen away from most of the secondary branches and white sticks, soggy with rot, have been littering the yard like wet pretzels after storms.

"That tree is infested with ants," said my neighbors, the Ladies who used to be my tenants, "See how the trunk is discolored?" They pointed to a blueish track climbing up the short fat wrist of a trunk to where its branches splayed into fingers like an outstretched hand. Holes where previous branches had once been had only partially healed over and the wood beneath was rotting.

But if the tree was half-dead, it was also half-alive. Clumps of leaves grew like stubble in odd places on even the dead arteries, and several of the fingers defied gravity with the seeming weight of growth that extended over more than half my neighbors' yard.

Mom gave me one of those "tree faces" gags that you see in the same store aisle as bird baths and reflecting globes - two eyes and a nose you nail onto the trunk. My "tree face" had a mustache and a surprised look and I hung it on that tree, covering one of the rotting holes. With the face in place, the part-dead part-living tree gave the appearance of needing a really good haircut. My other Gaybors, the couple who incessantly gardens and plant tropical plants that have to be dug up every fall and replanted every spring, got quite a kick out of it because it "looked like Uncle Bill." ha ha har.

But after two years of watching the soggy dead branches covering the yard, I decided the tree was slowly dying and might as well come down. And yesterday the men with buzz-saws were here and it was gone in a few hours. I watched for a bit, looking for justification that some of the fingers were indeed hollowed out from rot. But after a while I went into the other room. Maybe all I should have given it was "a really good haircut."

When the yard was cleared, the stump ended about two feet off the ground. "Took it down as far as I could without hitting the fence," said the foreman. I felt terrible as I looked at it. There was not a bit of rot and the core of the tree, inside its outer ring, was a bright red, damp, giving off a powerful odor - a sweet odor of living. Ants were beginning to dance around this part, touching the red with their fore-legs. "Them's carpenter ants," said the foreman, but he was wrong. Carpenter ants have straight antennae and these ants had the bent ones. Harmless black ants; Picnic ants.

Today, the red core has turned brown and is dry to the touch. "Your yard will come back now," said the Ladies, inspecting. And here I am at 5 in the morning, unable to sleep.