Another task that grandma oversees is the corrective pruning of little trees. This is a job that she takes very seriously and wishes she had more time to do it. This year, she took the girls out to work on baby white and scotch pines, all the while looking over her shoulder to make sure we did not cut off too much. She stressed the importance of “looking back at our trees” to “find a line” and many times would follow us to clean up what we missed. A few trees earned the title of “prayer trees” when we decided there was nothing else we could do for them. Luckily, we had more work-in-progress trees than prayer trees, but Jill made sure to talk encouragingly to every single one, in hopes of a miracle.