Old Order Mennonite Memoirs

This past spring when we hired professionals to cut down some of our dying trees, we also asked them about the mammoth maple tree that towers over our patio. Although my husband had trimmed a lot of dead and dying limbs off, he was worried that we should cut it down completely, lest in some future storm, it would crash on our living room roof. But besides cutting off more limbs, Ebersole of Lofty Heights thought we had a few good years left in the disintegrating tree.

I was relieved because I cannot imagine our patio without the natural air-condition of that sprawling tree even though the...