When we first moved into this house we found we had a dead tree in our yard. Years ago someone had planted a trio of aspens along the fence separating our yard from the neighbor’s. Two of them were on their side, one on ours. And ours was dead. I’ve been meaning to do something about it for awhile, but it looked like a lot of work, but not enough to justify hiring someone to come cut it down for me.
As I was coming home from work last night I found my neighbor out in his front yard cutting down the two trees on his side. They were starting to die out, so he figured he’d take care of them. He asked if I wanted him to take ours down while he was at it. Gee, let me think…
Chainsaws are awesome, and our neighbor knows what he’s doing. He dropped one tree in the five-foot gap between flowerbeds. He dropped ours between our maple tree and our fairly young flowering tree in the corner, and only broke off two twigs from the maple. He also made short work of all three. We had all the trees down, cut up and piled up for the trash collectors in less than an hour. It took me three hours just to thin one of our trees last weekend.
And then, even though we told them we could easily handle it ourselves the next day, he and his wife, son, son-in-law, and grandkids insisted on helping up clean up all the twigs and leaves left on our lawn when the tree came down.
Robert Frost said “good fences make good neighbors.” If so, we must have one incredibly good fence between us. Their help was definitely appreciated.
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