Mistakes can be lovable too

This is just at dawn, when the almost infinitely long shadows stretch right across the fields.

This is my neighbour's house, and along one side of it was a long row of 13 limes. They shimmer in sunny breezes, and from my house you look down the row to fields beyond.

Richard, my neighbour, was a farmer. He is a practical man: skilled, resourceful, creative. But most of all he is meticulous, painstaking. A planner.

The limes were fine when they were small, but began to crowd each other, canopies interlocking, a dense mass of foliage in summer, with no room to grow. Trees don't like to be so close, and their shape suffers in the chase for light. 

Richard decided to take out alternate trees, and planned to invite a group of friends with chainsaws to fell them. The deal was that we each took a tree down, cut it up, and could keep the timber. It was a fun approach: six trees heading for new lives as bowls, carvings, craft work of all kinds. Lime is a forgiving wood to carve, surprisingly soft to cut and straight grained. It is easy to work and responds well to sharp blades, though it is allergic to being smoothed with glass paper when it tends to go annoyingly fluffy.

On a sunny Saturday we all turned up. Richard had marked the trees with tape to indicate which were due to come down. He introduced us to our tree. There was coffee, cakes, sunshine in an open field and lovely timber. Partners and wives came with the cutters, and children were kept well away on the lane to watch from a safe distance. It was a festive atmosphere, almost like a barn-raising.

Once a tree was down, the longer task of cutting it up, taking off the branches and gradually reducing it to usable timber absorbed us. Richard hovered around, and mid-morning went off to make more coffee.

It was then that one of the partners got confused, and, not having had the original instructions, took a saw to a tree that was not taped to come down. Nobody noticed the saw chattering away. There were chainsaws everywhere, ear defenders keeping the noise at bay.

When Richard came out with the coffee, there was a gap in his carefully planned line. An unfillable gap, and seven trees down instead of six.

He said nothing, delivered the coffee, kept on smiling. The gap was not mentioned at all. Only later did I find out that his heart sank at the mistake. 

In twenty years living across the lane from him, I never saw him angry. He considers all news carefully, almost ponderously. You can almost see the cogs whirring as he takes stuff in, turns it over, looks for solutions. He is never quick to act, and tends to compost problems until solutions begin to emerge.

His solution was to love the gap. His carefully planned line would have been fine, but he decided that the additional view that the gap afforded was great, and loved the afternoon sun which the trees had blocked so well. He decided that the small gap was perfect. Now his garden offers both sun and shade on summer afternoons, and he can choose to sit in either.

It reminded me of Garrison Keillor:

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.