Minding Our Own Business--Put To The Test

Ack! And what a test it has been.

We drove home from running errands today and --oh my-- our neighbors behind us and just to the left, were having their huge backyard tree chopped down. We have no wooden fences near us, so these yards feel all connected (in a way), so there they were chopping down this 100 year-old + tree which always felt like it was partly ours. Though, I know, I know--it wasn't.

But still.

We sat in the car a couple minutes and watched the men destroy that huge tree (I'm clueless about most tree names, but it looked like the one in the above picture), the one I always collected red,yellow, and orange leaves from every autumn, the tree which housed the backyard birds I feed each morning, the tree which blazed in glory outside our upstairs guest room windows.

And right away we began muttering and complaining under our breath as we unlocked the side door and stepped into our house. "Tree murderers! Bird home wreckers. Shade destroyers."

Sigh. But of course, this is a major example of something which is none of our business. No matter how much we'd like it to be--it just isn't. No matter how much it hurts, after 13 years of living here and seeing that huge tree, still, it's none of our business that our neighbors chose to kill it.

Drats.


***
P.S. I dug up a picture from a shoebox of the now-dead tree... This was just the bottom half of it, it was twice as tall and twice as colorful as this washed-out photo makes it look. ...sigh...