Front Yard Magic

I walked out into a warm winter day a week and a half ago, which at that point was nearly fifty. While walking across the street I heard noise around the tall 10 foot bushes blocking our driveway from the next door neighbor's house. Looking over I saw a young girl wearing a pink sweatshirt. I noticed that she carried a two-foot stick in her hand. She was thrusting the stick at a branch about twice as long on the ground in front of her. It appeared as if the stick was serving as some sort of magic wand, and she was directing the magic to the longer branch below. I called out a hello to her, and she cheerfully said hello back. Before I could even ask her what exactly she was doing she told me that she was trying to make the branch disappear. I asked her how that was coming. She scrunched up her face, wrinkled her nose, faintly smiled, and held the sapling wand to her body with both arms as if she was suddenly embarrassed. "Half of it?" I asked her. Then she shook her head, held up her hand, and made parallel her thumb and index finger indicating that she had made just a little bit of the branch disappear. I wished her luck with the rest of it. As I drove down the street in front of her, I waved good bye. She just kept hugging the stick with her body and scrunching her face, making that embarrassed look again. I wonder if she was embarrassed that she was trying to make the stick disappear in the first place or that she had made just a small portion of it disappear. I very much hope that it was the latter. Imagine.