"You'd better open yours," he said, smirk still decorating the corners of his mouth, and pulled out an awkwardly wrapped box from behind the bookcase – the shape of which instantly crushed any delicious hopes I had for receiving the full DVD set of Magnum p.i. A few minutes of paper-tearing brought me face-to-face with the incontrovertible proof of our middle age – a Ryobi electric chain saw with four-inch cutting capacity, and a five-inch grin across my face to be given such a prize.

So here we are, past the diamond pendants and the sexy colognes and on to brush cutters and chain saws, and instead of feeling vaguely saddened over the passing of time and the seasons of life, I feel like I did when I was twelve and there was a refurbished Atari under the Christmas tree.

Unlike the Atari, which only came with two cassettes and a waiting line behind three squawking siblings, these toys of middle age come with ten acres of brush and invasives with which to play. With two tools and two bodies to wield them, there's no waiting line and no end to the brilliant satisfaction one gets from beating back Nature when the winter has her hands tied behind her back.

For the time to wage battle against one's understory is not when it is crowding out woodland ephemerals or climbing ruthlessly over treasured saplings in the spring and summer. It is now; when the wind whips coldly against your legs and rain is always of the drizzling variety and registers in the 30 degree range.

Sometimes a good pair of gloves is all you need. Especially if you are fortunate enough to see slightly frozen soil thawed out by a lovely string of warm fronts. Roots thus loosened often pull out of the soil with just a light tug. Wine berry, black raspberry and blackberry are quite easy to eradicate this way, as are smaller clumps of multiflora rose and (believe it or not) small ailanthus and box elder saplings. Sheath your sword, motorized or otherwise, and take the time to remove roots and all when you can. A pulled weed is a dead weed, never to re-sprout.

Of course the biggest difficulty in giving a husband a motorized tool for larger jobs and telling him to wreak carnage in a specific area of the understory is that once you turn your back to re-adjust the bar and chain on your own tool, he moves to an unspecified area and mows down an Allegheny viburnum and several native spicebush – forcing one to swallow one's bile if one doesn't want to lose one's brute squad.

And boy do I need that brute squad. There is so much brush to be dealt with in the wooded parts of this property that, as much as I detest those popular but mawkishly sentimental, mass-produced signs proclaiming pastel-colored affection, I am often tempted to hang a slightly adulterated version over the barn door that states "Our [under]story starts here."

Even working side-by-side and bonding through the shared love of power tools, I don't think I'll ever be tempted to hang the sugar-sweet "And they lived happily ever after." There is little chance that I will be able to swallow further bile once the man fells another treasured shrub.

"There will be blood" seems to me to be far more apt – perhaps I can have it stenciled in a lovely pastel green.