Life In The 'Hood #2

Today I looked out the window and I saw this:

There was a man in my tree. Of course, 'my' is a term I have absolutely no right to use. It's not my tree. It's just situated next to my yard. Again, not really my yard, but for all intents and purposes, I'm Queen of this postage stamp. Back to the man in my tree...

The man in my tree was here to divest the tree of some of its limbs. You see, there were a few incidents this summer. Some of the local kids discovered they had attained the required height for climbing this particular tree. Not a problem. The problem began when a couple of them started running off at the mouth. Things heated up nicely when they argued that they were not staring in the neighbour lady's windows. Unfortunately, they were arguing with the neighbour lady who was sitting in her living room behind her six-foot fence. She wrote a letter to the building managers and copied the owners.

Mr. B and I got involved when we clearly saw unsafe things happening. 7 and 8 kids crawling all over each other in the tree ignoring my tree-climbing 'rules': stay off any dead branches as well as those thinner than your arm. Then there was the day I found a few of them using bricks to gouge the bark off the tree. Sure, they put the bricks down when I asked them to, but then they tried to rip branches off the tree...and proceeded to swing from them when they were only partly successful. I asked the building manager to step in because of all of this and I was concerned. The kids had stopped listening to me and it was becoming incredibly inconvenient to look out the window all day. Someone was going to get hurt.

So much to my surprise, the tree guys showed up today - a month and a half after the last kid lost their copious amounts of summer free time - and did a very good job at trimming the tree. I was surprised because there had been no response to my - nor the neighbour lady's - complaint. I'd like to say that the building manager/out-of-town owners are the proactive, pride in ownership, get-'er-done types but I'd be lying. They're more the squeaky wheel, bring along the property standards guy and then they start to wake up type of people.

But, in the end, the tree has been trimmed. One more thing around here got taken care of..or 15 things, if you count the number of kids who can't spy on the neighbour lady before falling out of the tree, cracking their backs on 'my' fence on the way down.

On a more personal note, The Boy and The Girl both learned a thing or two about how the professionals trim a tree and then clean up after themselves. The Boy was quite intrigued by the ropes and harness. The Girl is responsible for all the photographs. And for talking the tree guys' ears off - from well out of the way - throughout the entire job.