Big day today. I’m scheduled to get a new tool. It should be here this afternoon. It’s a tree puller. Well, little trees to be more specific. The kind that sprout up because birds poop their seeds in bad places. Hackberries in my case. To rephrase Archimedes, give me a tool able to grip a small tree, a fulcrum, and a long enough handle and I can pull any hackberry from the ground. We used them in the park across the street when I was helping to remove ligustrums. Now, I’ll have my own.

I like specialty tools. Tools designed specifically for the job. You use them only occasionally, but when you need them, you need them and they save you from lots of knuckle-busting, back-breaking, profanity-laced work. For instance, I have a pole saw hanging in the tool shed, a small chainsaw on the end of a long pole. It’s not an every-day tool, but this winter when the Turks Caps and Lantanas are bare, woody messes, I will trim them to the ground with a single swipe. Sweet.

Specialty tools are empowering. A lot of life is about trying to get things done. And the pain of life is finding out just how difficult it is sometimes to accomplish that goal of getting those things done. Think about it. A dishwasher is a specialty tool. So is a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner. The list goes on. Granted, my tree puller may never enjoy the ubiquitous status of a washing machine, but that’s beside the point. The point is that when you need help you get a specialist, someone who knows what they’re doing, and then you listen to them and use them, otherwise you’ll find yourself with a shovel digging to china to get that hackberry out of the ground, when all you really needed was a tool that grabbed it at the base and held on while you leaned back.