Bramlett's Tree Trimming

About Bramlett's Tree Trimming

Corder sits at a crossroads in Lafayette County where the fields run flat enough to see a pickup's headlights coming a mile off, hedgerows of old osage orange the only break in the wind for miles, and it's along those same hedgerow lanes that Bramlett's Tree Trimming spends its winter mornings. The trees out here were mostly planted as windbreaks a couple of generations back, meant to keep topsoil from blowing off open ground, and a heavy ice storm can still bring down enough deadwood from them to block a farm lane before daylight. Clearing that debris comes first, then the plow work — long gravel and dirt lanes connecting farmsteads to the county road, drifted over by wind that has nothing standing between here and the Kansas line to slow it down. One crew covers a lot of open ground out here rather than a dense grid of driveways, distances between jobs measured in miles of flat farmland instead of blocks. By midmorning what was an impassable lane is a single clear track running out to the county road, hedgerow shadows striping it in long blue lines across the snow.