Don’t Worry Be Happy

I’m pretty sure the coolest person I ever met, was my great uncle Robert. He lived a rough and hard life, yet he was one of the happiest, most loving, forgiving, purest souls you’d ever meet.

My uncle Robert loved music. When he lived with us, he would blast his music. It brought him so much joy. One of his favorite songs was, “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” When I hear it, I always think of him.

Since then, it has become one of Ben’s favorite songs.

On a completely separate note, since moving into our new house, my life has been consumed by trees. We have a ton of massive oak trees in our new yard. Two of them, far away from the house, were completely dead. These obviously had to come down. A few others were very close to the house, and they made me uneasy.

I had a feeling in my gut that this was not safe. I couldn’t sleep during storms. I felt strongly that my kids’ lives were at risk.

I love trees, truly I do, but I love my sons and mine and Erik’s lives more, so we had the ones close to the house cut down.

This was very emotional for us because we truly do love trees. I literally cried the day we had these beauties taken down.

It’s a good thing we did though because the tree company reported that one of the trees extremely close to the house was so rotted at the roots that he was was amazed it hadn’t fallen down on our house already.

However, what seemed like a simple thing, became an utter fiasco.

Erik wanted some wood left for us. SOME, but the tree company we hired, left us approximately 25 cords…. cut in wacky sized pieces and stacked precariously all over our front and side lawn. 🤯

We live in a residential neighborhood with tons of kids. It is not appropriate visually for us to have these giant piles of wood, and it was a hazard to children who may find it fun to climb on.

There was no way we could just leave these piles and take our time with it. The wood had to go.

Many of the pieces were not cut into reasonable sized pieces. I’m talking 700lb hunks of tree. Wayyyy bigger than the standard and reasonable size of 18” to split.

The tree company was giving us a run around and telling us that they were busy and “maybe” they could come back to cut the huge pieces down into manageable pieces, the next week or the week after.

This was not going to work because it was truly dangerous. Defeatedly, I just plugged along trying to find solutions.

At this point, it had been a week of non stop splitting, stacking, and blasting our wood pile all over Facebook marketplace and local community pages to get rid of it.

I had never worked so hard in all my life. It was all consuming.

I was feeling utterly hopeless and helpless.

There was so much wood left on our side yard, and we reached pieces that were so big that Erik couldn’t split it or get a chainsaw through it.

I was getting desperate. The only thing I could think of to solve my problem was to ask my uncle to bring one of his excavators over to load the giant pieces of wood into a dump truck and bury it somewhere.

To show him the massiveness of this wood, I took a video of myself walking around this pile that we had already removed close to half of, but was still HUGE.

Without watching it, I sent it to my mom to show him.

After a while, I sat down to watch the video I sent my Uncle. Eli sat next to me. I was exhausted on a level hard to describe and had tears in my eyes.

As I played the video, and I’m watching myself walk around this insanely large pile of wood, coming blasting through my phone speakers is the tune of, “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”

Ben’s playlist was playing when I recorded, and I didn’t even realize it.

Eli and I both burst out laughing.

It was the first time I had laughed in so long.

It was healing.

I felt uncle Robert close to me in that moment. I could hear his voice again telling me it was going to be alright, and “we’ll do it together” as he would always say about hard things.

Nothing changed with the woodpile, but for the first time, it didn’t feel so horrible.

I kid you not, not even an hour later, the tree company showed up unexpectedly and took some of the massive pieces and cut up most of the other ones into relatively manageable pieces.

The pile was not gone by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t seem so hopeless.

By the grace of God, almost two weeks later, our wood is split and stacked, and the rest of it given away.

It’s been nearly 14 years since Uncle Robert died, yet his simple truth and way of living is still touching my heart and bringing peace and laughter to my life.

“In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry, you make it double. Don’t worry. Be happy.” -Bobby McFerrin