Stumped again

To paraphrase Joyce Kilmer:

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as my neighbors trash cans

In front of my tree.

Yes, (sigh), those neighbors. There's no reason they can't put their trash cans in front of their house, or for that matter any other house but mine. But then they wouldn't get to annoy the living piss out of me once a week. And what fun would that be.

However as of today, they'll have to find another landmark to situate their cans by.

That beautiful tree in front of my house - the picture doesn't do it justice - has been dying for a long, long time. You can't see the top of it here, but half of it had no leaves, and there was this very unpleasant fungus growing around the bottom.

And I think we all know how painful that can be.

Since it's on our parkway, we called the city to come out and have a look at it. Before the city arborist even closed the door getting out of his car, he said, "Oh yeah, that one's dead. It's gotta come out."

So as of a couple days ago, the tree leaves at the top that we've peered out at for over 13 years through the transom windows in our bedroom are gone.

All that's left is the stump, which the city will come back and grind down in a couple weeks.

Our homeowner's association, which I've dealt with several times (don't get me started), has a rule: if a tree comes out, the homeowner replaces it.

So that's what we'll do. In fact, we've already chosen the variety of tree we want.

It's called a ginkgo. Our neighbor across the street has one in front of his house. Every fall when the kids were younger, we'd take our Christmas card picture with them playing in the yellow leaves that dropped from it around November.

It's a gorgeous tree.

Of course, it'll be a few years before it's filled in and mature enough to start dropping leaves. But once it is, it'll be magnificent.

With or without trash cans in front of it.