I'm so over trying to protect my pride. Ready to spill ugly truths. I saw this picture and remembered some wild times in the past.
My neighbors did this to my tree. This isn't a picture of my house and my tree. My tree was much smaller, farther from their house, and couldn't have hit their house if it fell nor could it have done more than disturb the dirt on their car if it hit. But they were assholes (the wife had served time for murder, the husband was drunk every time I saw him, and you can imagine the kids they raised). They did this to my tree and then reported me to the city for having dead trees that they were afraid would fall onto their pool, and then they filed a lawsuit claiming that a limb had fallen from my a tree in my back yard and fell into their pool and damaged the lining. They included an estimate for the new liner which was much higher than replacing the entire pool. Because, as you might have guessed, they were not smart.
There were brown places on the front tree after they cut it. And, there were chains around the tree in the back yard, put there by an arborist, who wanted to make sure it couldn't hit their dilapidated fence should it fall from a split instead of healing as the arborist believed it could, or the dog pen where they kept a mangy, mean dog that they occasionally fed by dumping dog food over the top of the fence onto the ground. I never once saw them let that dog out of the cage, or saw them go into the cage, or imagined why they had that dog, or their even more dilapidated pool that had dead limbs in it before I moved into my house.
I did not have dead trees. I had one tree that had been damaged in a storm and might have been on life support, and one tree that dropped needles that the mail carrier might have tracked onto their property.
Their pool. I wish I still had the pictures or was friends on Facebook with the police officer who told me about the pool, or the friend who took one look at that pool and nearly fell over the railing on my deck laughing. Their supportive confirmation of my opinion would be funnier than mine.
They had an above ground, round pool - the kind you bought at K-mart, not the pool store. There was no deck around their pool. Not even stairs - just the little ladder that comes in the box with the pool, broken and lying crumpled in stagnant water on the bottom of the pool. And a torn, rubber lining that was only partly attached with ribbing around the edge of the pool. I'm not mocking that pool - we had one like it, bought at K-mart shortly after we moved in. And it was enjoyable. But their pool had seen its last good day at least five years before we moved in and was only used at that time as a trash bin for broken lawn furniture, stagnant rain water, leaves (maybe from MY tree), and a limb that they obviously tossed into the pool since there was no side damage on the pool from falling in - not the reason for which it was intended whether that was swimming or drowning neighbors they didn't like.
First, a police officer came to arrest me for not cutting down my dead trees after a city worker drove past the forest they had not mowed and told me to. This officer didn’t handcuff me - an obviously unwell, frail person, but he did take me out and put me in the back seat of his car where I sobbed and said, “I can’t believe you are arresting me over trees.”
He checked his paperwork, asked which trees, I pointed them out, and he told me to go back inside, and he drove away.
Then, I got the summons to appear in court for both the trees and the pool. And I went prepared, with pictures of the pool and the trees, the real price of a pool liner, and my poem about the family tree. And I explained to the judge how I was just like the trees on my property – fighting for my life and hoping that everyone wanted to help me, not but me out of my misery. I also pointed out that there were more green leaves than brown ones on my trees.
The judge ruled in my favor and told the neighbor and the city to leave my trees and me alone.
