People are what they
believe – Anton Chekhov
I was outside watering my
tomatoes when I heard what I was sure was a rabid grizzly bear beating the
bushes in my neighbor’s yard. It’s hard to describe a sound, but suffice it to
say that if you have seen any wild grizzly movies on the silver screen (Night
of the Grizzly and The Edge come immediately to mind) you will know the ominous
sound of a beast single-mindedly wanting to have you for breakfast – or dinner.
Well, that was the sound I heard
over in the corner of the yard as I was tending to my veggies (which are doing
very nicely, I should add). I looked up from my hydrating duties to see what
was causing such a crunchy commotion just in time to see a mighty bough break
off from the neighbor’s fir tree and come crashing down onto the fence
separating our two properties.
The good news is that the bough
was crib-less, so no “rock-a-bye” babies fell as the incident unfolded. Also,
while it had been my intention to water plants and bushes where the tree limb
fell, I hadn’t gotten that far, so this baby did not have his noggin cracked by
the aforementioned falling bough.
After confirming that I was still
in one piece and whole in both life and limb (and heart continued beating
within my own trunk – although it wasn’t beating about the bush), I went and
got my wife to tell her what had happened (after all, she is the branch manager
of our home) and the two of us trundled over to our neighbors to let them know
about the damage to the fence we shared.
I thought the tree belonged to
him, but as it turns out, it belongs to yet another neighbor who, while
friendly enough, declined any responsibility. “The tree is on my side of the
fence,” he said, “but it was planted by someone else and is actually on the
property line, so it’s not mine.”
Ah, who says good fences (or
walls) make for good neighbors? Some knot-head, no doubt.
Anyway, it didn’t matter to me
who the tree belonged to and, the fact is, the damage to the fence was minimal.
My neighbor and I took a couple of saws and loppers to the offending yard waste
and laid waste to the trespassing vegetation. We chopped and lopped everything
down to size in about an hour, and then loaded everything into my pickup,
hauled it to the landfill and dumped it. A few days later we replaced the
broken stringer and reinstalled the fence boards and, voila, all was made whole
once again.
I do worry the tree will continue
to shed limbs, for it does not appear to be a healthy tree. It has a number of
dead branches holding on for no good reason except to keep the world in
suspense. There hadn’t been any wind the day that one big bough broke, but I
give gravity credit for its fall. It had no choice; it was the Law (of
gravity).
I won’t lose any sleep over the
matter. No one was injured. The incident gave me a chance to get to know my
next-door neighbor a lot better as we worked together. I got to at least meet
another neighbor I had not known at all, and I suspect I will get to know him
and his wife better as the law of gravity continues to be rigorously enforced
in our neighborhood. He may deal with his tree; he may not. We’ll cross that
bridge when we come to it. The tree is sick, to be sure, but it is also short
enough it is highly unlikely it will convert our home into a tree-house any time
soon.
I will admit that fences help
delineate property lines, but I wonder if they truly do promote neighborliness.
It took a broken fence to discover who my true neighbor is.
A fence may give the illusion of
security, but I dare say it’s only an illusion. Not only did a mindless fir
crush it, but squirrels cross it all the time as they plunder Nature’s Market
for their daily bread!
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