I made a terrible mistake today and did some yard work on purpose. We have a large tree in the front yard whose branches hang too low, so that if you’re mowing or whatever they need to be moved out of the way to take care of the part of the yard under the tree. I was all ready to post something on Twitter or whatever commenting on how it had turned out to be one of those jobs that you dread for forever and then takes like fifteen minutes when you actually do it, and then I discovered my neighbor standing behind me. I had headphones in, so this isn’t terribly surprising, mind you.
At any rate, I then got to have a lovely conversation about how too much of my tree was overhanging her yard and also overhanging the roof of her house. Now, this tree is really tall— I’m terrible at estimating distances, but it’s easily over twice as tall as my house, so obviously doing something like cutting a straight line along the property line wasn’t going to happen. I pointed out that we were having some folks out sometime soon to cut down the locust tree in the back yard and that I’d ask if they could hack this one back a bit on the taller branches, and that I’d take care of the stuff I could reach today.
And then it occurred to me that somehow the following had happened: one of my neighbors came over, complained about the state of my yard, demanded that I fix the state of my yard, and that somehow I not only did it but I’m not even mad about it. Like, that’s got to be a tricky conversation to have with somebody, right? I can see that going poorly. Were the situations reversed I’d have just asked if she minded if I cut the damn branches myself to avoid the chance of a confrontation going south and ending up on YouTube or some shit.
The problem here is that I’d already cut enough branches to fill our two allocated yard waste bins, so now there’s a giant pile of branches in front of my house the size of a car that are just going to have to sit there until what’s in the bins now gets taken away, and then I can cut them apart and fill the bins again. And frankly it’s not impossible that the process will have to be repeated twice. In the meantime, I’ve been sweaty and tired all afternoon and a lot more achy than I intended to be, because using a pole saw for an hour is tiring.
Also, I made sure that not one single inch of that pile of branches is on her yard. I’m considerate like that.
Here are the rules of Raking Leaves. Well, the Rule of Raking Leaves, because there’s really only the one rule: you are responsible for the leaves in your yard, period. The location of the tree does not matter, because leaves blow. We raked leaves last Saturday. There were leaves in my yard from oak trees, and I don’t even know where the nearest oak tree is. Nevertheless, because I am a Good Neighbor, and because the two trees in the front yard I share with my immediate neighbor (in the sense that they but up against each other with no fence as a divider; it’s one big chunk of grass) are both in my lawn, I did my best to blow as many of “his” leaves as I could into our pile. The majority of them fell off of my tree. I use an electric leaf blower, and if you had looked right after we did it you could pretty neatly delineate exactly how far my cord let me get into his yard, because those areas were bare of leaves.
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