What a wonderful break in the weather today! Great to open the windows and not be hit by a blast furnace. It's still too dang windy, though, but maybe tomorrow...
We've been gradually chipping away at work that needs to be done in the yard. This morning, several weeks past the scheduled date, a merry trio of tree trimmers appeared in our back yard. I was sitting at the table in the sun room reading the paper and having a cup of coffee when a kid carrying a ladder passed the window, followed by a short blonde woman who looked just like Joyce Aarsvold. I was in my pj's so went to find Larry/Dad/Paco, and took a quick look out the front door to see if the name of the business was on their truck so I could pretend to know who they were. A pick-up truck with no name on it made me panic momentarily, figuring this to be a fly-by-night band of tree trimmers. A third person appeared--the owner of the business--and we figured out they were the right people.
The oak tree in the back yard suffered damage in an ice storm late in the winter, which was the main purpose of tracking down someone with a chainsaw who doesn't mind climbing trees.
To get a trailer into the yard to haul away the limbs, the Joyce Aarsvold look-alike drove the pickup truck through the railroad easement that serves as a pseudo-alley behind our house. She whipped along at a good clip. After parking the truck, she headed back to a box that holds wires from the cable company at the intersection of our lot and Rosenows'. Apparently she bumped the box with the trailer, and went back to straighten it. We didn't think any more about it. A while later, Peter, the lead guy, drove the truck and trailer out through our yard, along the north side of the house, also at a pretty good clip. I feared for the hedge and the peonies, but they sprang back into shape after a quick brush with the truck and trailer.
Moving on to the remaining items we hired them to do, the trimmers took out a tree behind our shed, removed a bush from a neighbor's yard, and took down a limb from an ash tree in our front yard that looked poised to do some roof damage if we continue to have wind like in the past few days. After they left, Larry snipped a few stray ends off the oak and linden trees in the back yard, and we thought that would be the last of it.
However, about an hour ago, a local gendarme appeared at our doorstep wondering if we'd had some work done in our yard today, and did the person doing it haul a trailer into the yard. Yup and yup. He said the electrical box behind Mr. and Mrs. Duck Face's house had been hit by the trailer and twisted off the base, causing quite a bit of damage. City workers would cap it tonight, and then repair it tomorrow, and the city wanted to know who was responsible so they could charge them for the damage. This being a small town, not only did the cop know the perpetrator, but this very same tree-trimming trio had done some work in his mother's yard only a few days ago. Dum-da-dum-dum....
Almost immediately after the officer left our house, a flurry of activity began as city workers arrived to temporarily repair the electrical box. Over the humming of city truck engines voices of several neighborhood backyard experts (as Dad/Larry/Paco refers to them) drifted through the sun room on the cool breeze that is blowing, offering advice to the repair folk and clicking their tongues about women drivers, no doubt. Now the voices are gone, and the box is not a danger to children or stray pets who might wander through the yards in the middle of the night.
