The McDonaldland Tree gets a grille

We spent this weekend having an early celebration of my birthday and performing more backbreaking labor in the back of our yard. Woody spent a long excruciating time going at a thigh-sized tree root (thigh-sized if you were a supermodel...but still pretty big to chop through with the maddock.) to put in one of our rhododenrons. I plowed through the tangle of thorny vines and yards-long creepers that had overtaken one of the big trees.

Now I am not one to take up residence in some high branches and weep to loggers about how my "friend" has "asked" me to stop them. I don't name our trees things like Luna. But this poor tree in our yard has seen some tough times. A plastic cord snakes out of the bottom, where the tree has engulfed it. I pried what looked to be a fender out of its trunk. (Our home used to be the site of an "informal auto repair" outfit, remember?) And when I thought I had found what looked to be a vine that grew in a strangely geometrical pattern...I realized a piece of fence was embedded in the guts of this tree. I tried to put a positive spin on it -- maybe it was like a milquetoast tree in Belton getting a grille. But there seemed to be less in the way of bling:

And more in the way of very sad-looking rust:


It just looked so mean to that poor tree. It would be kind of like walking up to this guy:
and saying "Hey Unnamed Happy Tree, guess what Happy Meal surprise I have for YOU? Tetanus! Yippee!" I mean I would definitely mash some gnarly rusty hunk of fence into Ronald's face or even the face of the Hamburglar, but definitely not Unnamed Happy Tree. That's just cruel.