This is what I saw directly in front of the House by the Parkway when I returned from work yesterday. The thing is that yesterday, before I left home for work, this was a tree roughly as high as my house. In fact, I used that tree that very morning to lean on to stretch my legs after my walk. I’ve been using that tree for that purpose for at least a half dozen years, and I sure as hell didn’t ask anyone to cut it down.

I know that it had to be the town that cut down the tree, because the town actually “owns” the trees that reside between the sidewalk and the curb. It was the town that planted the tree (now Mr. Stump) about fifteen years ago after some douche bag smacked into and destroyed the then-existing tree with his car.

But still, WTF? Nobody smacked into this tree. It was perfectly fine just ten hours earlier.

I entered the house pissed to the max.

When I asked Mrs. Parkway, who was home all day that day, if she saw that some son of a bitch cut down our tree, she explained that a town tree guy knocked on the door and explained that half the tree was dead. He opined that the tree should, therefore, be cut down, but that the frontage of the house was actually wide enough to accommodate two trees, which he said the town would return at a later date to plant.

Hell, I thought the tree was perfectly fine, but: (a) I’m not a tree mavin, and (b) there was no point in giving Mrs. Parkway or the town, for that matter, a ration of shit, as neither would have brought my tree back.

So, the bottom line is that, probably sometime in the tree planting season (whenever the hell that is) the town will show up and plant a couple saplings in front of the house. Great. I figure that by the time they are real trees, I’ll be seventy-farookin’-five. Hell, I’m still young enough to buy green bananas, but sheesh!

I think I would have kept the half-dead tree, which, as noted above, didn’t look at all dead to me.

Progress? Feh!