If A Tree Falls In Your Front Yard, Does Your Neighbor Make A Sound?

Here's a tale to take your mind off all the arglebargle from the chattering classes ranging from "Biden:  Great Choice!" to "Biden: Unmitigated Disaster!"

 My parents live in Small Town, USA.  Most of the houses on their street are well-tended, with one notable exception.  This couple's lawn is littered with rusty hunks of metal, several semi-broken swing sets (I guess if you add up all the partially functional swing sets, it counts as one full set), tires, rims, and various and sundry unrecognizable objets de crap.  Their front porch would be nice if it weren't full of non-functioning household appliances and broken couches. The house itself used to look one step above ramshackle, until the electric utility sided it for free under a low-income homeowners' program.  They have a number of poorly socialized dogs who run barking and snarling to the road whenever anyone walks by. Toys for all seasons are left all over the place all the time, so that one might find a sled resting next to a bike on top of a skateboard, all of it jumbled in the packed dirt that comprises most of the yard.  Keep this in mind as events unfold...

At a recent visit to the ancestral seat, I noticed that a very tall, very old, very dead pine tree at the foot of my parents' yard had been taken down.  Apparently the electric utility finally decided to notice that said old, dead tree was immediately adjacent to the power lines.  Not fancying a midnight call from aggrieved customers suddenly deprived of power, they felled the tree.  After that, my father chain-sawed the tree into sections with plans to cut it up further into kindling.  Right after that, in the dark of night, someone came along and STOLE the cut-up chunks of very old, very dead tree, right out of my parents' front yard.

But wait!  There's more! Thanks to the small-town grapevine, my parents know whodunnit; namely, the trashy neighbors down the street.  My parents' across-the-street neighbor (hang with me here, I know it gets a little complicated) ambled by this house just after the Great Tree Theft Caper and noticed, hmmm, all of a sudden, there's a big stack of pine logs in their side yard!  "So, Slimebag,*" she said sweetly, "where'd you get that wood?"  "I took down a tree," he said defensively, throwing a tarp over the pile as quickly as he could.  Now he's taken to parking his rig in front of his woodpile, instead of off to the side as he's done since, oh, he moved into the house.  Coincidence?  You decide!

There are a couple of things that piss me off about this scenario.  First, there's the fact that my seventy-two-year-old father spent the better part of a day chainsawing this tree so this much younger asshat could waltz away with it, because nothing says 'classy' like ripping off senior citizens.  Second, the woman of the house has a couple of kids from her earlier marriage living with them.  Clearly they're going to grow up to be model citizens with those exemplars of moral living around.  Third, if they are planning to burn that pine wood for heat they are just as stupid as they look, as they're going to soot up their chimney and start a house fire sooner rather than later.  Last but far from least, this is just part of a greater pattern of general irresponsibility and moochery this couple exhibits. 

A case in point:  July 4th was a beautiful, picture-perfect day in the State Formerly Known As Home.  The sky was a cloudless azure. Cool breezes kept the golden sunshine from becoming oppressively hot.  The grass was a green to rival the Emerald Isle, and flowers bloomed in gardens and byways.  In short, when the advertising flacks came up with the slogan "the way life should be," this is what they had in mind.  I strolled back to my parents' from downtown, a route that took me past the Slimebags' residence.  As I got to their house, I noticed that, on a day that was going to hit seventy-five degrees tops, a day when the air was so cool that people were wearing jackets as late as ten o'clock in the morning in July, these people had all their windows shut and their air conditioners running full blast.  Why?  Because they don't care - the utility covers their bills!  Which means, in the end, that my parents, and everyone else on that street, are paying that couple's bills. 

Look, I'm a good bleeding-heart knee-jerk pinko commie liberal who believes in socialized medicine and mandatory recycling.  I truly believe that we, the people, all need to have a social safety net so our fellow human beings don't find themselves cold and hungry and homeless.  But by the same token, that doesn't mean you get to be a boil on the butt of society.  As the saying goes, I don't care how poor you are, you can still pick up your yard (I don't know who said it first, but it wasn't me). When this guy chucks his empty beer cans on the ground and brags to the across-the-street neighbor about how much he gets for free from the utility company (or the town, or the state), I can see why people turn Republican.  Plus, as my mom pointed out, if the guy had come up and asked them for the wood, they would have given it to him anyway!  Geez, just making even a token gesture of $25 for the wood would show some reasonable amount of human decency.

The conclusion of this tale is not especially satisfying.  My parents reported the theft to the police, who had no recourse given that all the evidence, as any good CSI would tell you, is purely circumstantial.  Warren got really pissed off and tried to get a look at the wood pile, but a snarling dog changed his mind PDQ.  This couple is definitely personae non grata with the neighborhood, but they were already anyway.  I could hope for a chimney fire, but I definitely wouldn't wish that on a house with kids in it.  I'll settle for a nice, deep splinter somewhere especially painful.

* Not their real name. In case you hadn't guessed.

Comments

[angel]

Boy can I relate to you on this. I just had a similar thing happen to me. My neighbor cut down our HUGE Maple tree in our side yard and cut up the wood and took it to there dads down the road to burn. The neighbors across the street from me are the same as you have described in your story and boy are they really tirents. So does this give these people the right to go into any ones yard to cut down trees? Law enforcement did not do anything here either.

[Ben Paxton]

Most liberal policies encourage and enable this type of behavior.