Our recent Edisto beach trip featured one event we’ve never seen there before. During our stay, a couple of trucks parked on the road behind the house and workers spent most of a day trimming and cutting down a couple of the larger palm trees that lined the road.

We’d heard this would be happening in the town this summer, though we didn’t expect it to impact us or to see it so closely. The town had previously announced the power company insisted on the removal of thousands of trees on the island that posed threats to power lines during a storm. Being a barrier island, Edisto is subject to frequent, sometimes severe storms.

Nobody likes to see the guys show up with chain saws and bucket lifts. Trees have a natural grace and beauty that no artificial barriers can match. They enhance every setting and are difficult to replace when removed.

On the flip side, we all depend on electricity. We don’t realize how much we rely on it until it goes out. I live in an area where outages happen at least once or twice a year, and it’s always frustrating. It can seem like everything we do relies on electricity.

We also have a lot of beautiful old oak trees in the neighborhood and every few years, a service employed by the power company comes through and trims or removes them in ways that are often just downright ugly.

I don’t like seeing healthy trees disfigured or cut down. I hate it. But I don’t like losing electricity in a storm, either. Power companies are starting to bury power lines now, but that’s not feasible everywhere. I don’t have an answer. Do you?