I'll say it: we had traditional gender roles for some things in our family: I did most of the cooking and grocery shopping; Greg did most of the home maintenance and yard work.
....and while I can change a tap washer and hammer a nail, there are some jobs which will always be beyond my capabilities.
Greg trimmed the large trees in our yard several years ago. He pruned branches and mulched leaves. Any fallen trees disappeared amongst machinery noise, but not much fuss.
Greg was a farm boy. I remember him using chainsaw to clean up logs for a pole-shed he was building on one of my first visits to the farm. The chainsaw had a blade that was about 4ft long.... it was massive. He handled it like a butter knife.
...and so you can understand the monumental effort I have been through to find someone handy enough with a chainsaw that I could trust to fall a an old bauhinia tree without either hurting themselves or the neighbours house which was overhung with branches.
But finally, another farm-boy has come to my rescue this week. .... in the form of Greg's sister's husband.
I mentioned my tree problem on one of the recent visits to Brisbane and then they were here with chainsaw and a spare and he had the tree down and chopped up into manageable pieces in half a day.
But unlike with Greg, I was his lackey - moving branches out of the way and pruning the thin branches for mulching from the thick branches for stacking.
It really made me stop and appreciate just what a dynamo Greg really was .... he made light of the heaviest labour.
Just another way he was completely amazing, and just another way I completely miss him.
