In the pen drawing made of the house some time before I bought it (and which I'm glad was passed on to me), you can see how the Roediger House looked, say, in the 1990s. From the front, it still looks much the same, although the shutters are gone...and so are those two trees. The one on the left had to be brought down almost exactly eight years ago, but the one on the right had been cut down before my time here.
Turns out, all this time, that right stump has been just beneath the surface, quietly rotting away while the topsoil covering it slowly dissipated. You can see the grassless patch in the upper right corner of the photo above (not that the whole grassy section doesn't look weak!). There was also a small opening to the hollow inside of that stump that had appeared:
So I figured it was time to dig it all out, which proved (of course!) to be a sufficiently involved endeavor.
It took about three days...
...and I had to bust up the very solid core of it, as well as chop away all the weaker rotting roots and shoots...
...but it all came up and out.
It was loading the last largest heaviest chunk (on the far right, above) into the wheelbarrow that offered me a chance to make a significant mistake: trying to hoist it alone, letting it tip and slip, so that I managed to wrench my back pretty well...and that put me off of yard work for a couple of days. But I've recovered and am back at my yearly spring shenanigans.
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