A Very Tall ( and very long) Tale

 

I've posted many times about the trees that surround our house. They are tall. Over 100 feet. They are big. Almost 100 inches in diameter. Nasty old poplars that somehow survived our terrific ice storm of 91 and are still littered with broken branches from it that will come down in the slightest wind. 

Recently I posted about the tree that took off the back of my neighbor's house. They haven't even started repairs and the insurance company stops paying for their rental in June. Their children, whose bedrooms were narrowly missed, are terrified to come home. It's been a nightmare for them. This wasn't the first house to have a direct hit from one. My neighbors on the left had one cut their house in half a few years ago too. 

Last year I posted about the tree that came down on my other neighbor's company truck. Totaled, as were all of his tools. 

I bawled like a baby when one murdered my beloved Mini Cooper in 2022. I waited 6 months for her to arrive here from Germany. She was one of the first off the assembly line. She would have gotten her historic tag in just a few months. I'm lucky I wasn't in it. One of these trees killed a man in his car on the road in front of the little grocery store down the street just last year. 

Then there is the work and the upkeep on them. they fall over for no reason from time to time and we have to cut them up and move them. Our woods look like a graveyard for tulip poplars. It's so sad. We're a forest fire waiting to happen.

So we finally said enough is enough and in early March we called the tree people. We told them to show us the trees that could kill us and we'll have them taken down. They marked off 24 and even found a company that would take the wood and that was that......we thought. 

Then the city stepped in.  We couldn't do anything without a permit. There are strict rules about what trees can come down. They sent a team of arborists to look over our property and make their recommendations. They sent the town tree board to look us over and make theirs. Then we had two hearings to see if we could get a permit. It was like being in court. The last one was on Monday and the minute they asked us if we had any comments before they had their final vote I jumped up to the podium and pretty much went hysterical on them. I'm tired of sleeping in the basement when the wind blows. I'm tired of wondering whether I should be going to bed with my bicycle helmet on. According to a very chagrined Mister I was pretty, um...animated while stating my case and......drum roll please. I won. Sort of. We can cut down our giant trees but we have to replace each and every one of them with something they approve of in order to preserve the "town canopy". We have to work with the town arborist to get this done and of course, none of this will be cheap. Sorry about your inheritance, kids. 

But....the real kicker is that because the process took so long we now have this to deal with. My black vulture friends all have babies that look just like this in those woods now so we can't do a thing until they leave the nest. That won't be until late summer which means we have to endure another storm season under those swaying monsters. 

It's always something dammit.