La la la la la la
...
When twilight dims the skies above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing I'm certain of
Return...
I will...
to old...
BRAZIL.
I saw the movie Brazil in the theatre on my 21st birthday with the man who is now my husband. I can't remember what we thought our status was in the middle of February, 1986. My life was complicated. There was this other guy. But anyway. History shows how things eventually turned out.
Purple-leaved Ash Tree, October 2005
A couple of weeks ago my husband (we've been married 18 years) had called the city's Forestry office to have our city-owned tree removed. The tree is an ash, with small fragrant blooms and green leaves in spring that turn purple as the season progresses. The tree -- as all trees of the same species on our street are -- is plagued with a disease that causes black cankers to grow on branches. There is no cure, so it has steadily deteriorated until almost every branch looks like a dog left something behind on it.
Canker, Spring 2008
Tree removal is a bureaucratic process, involving levels of paperwork designed to make sure that no one's tree is removed by mistake. Therefore, when a resident calls the city's Forestry office, the city first sends out a tree expert to determine that the tree really is in bad shape and needs to be removed. If so, the homeowner is served with written notice, and the tree is marked with a painted circle. Crews will only remove a tree that has been properly marked.
In the movie Brazil, a typing error leads to a mixup between the names "Tuttle" and "Buttle", and the wrong man is dragged off to be interrogated as a suspected terrorist.
The other day I overheard my neighbour two doors down (who because of our pie-shaped lots shares a tree with my immediate next-door neighbour) discussing how the next-door neighbour had received notice that the tree was scheduled for removal. Granted, that tree was actually in worse shape than ours, but still. The tree expert had the correct address written on his work order. He just marked the wrong tree.
I happened to be out on Friday afternoon when the work crews came by and removed the neighbours' tree. I arrived home just as they were finishing up, and one of the workers approached me and asked whether we had called the city about our tree. He told me that their work order had our address on it, but that they could only remove the tree that had the mark. Then he told me that their tree expert was going on vacation starting Monday and wouldn't be available for a while.
It was then that I started humming the theme from Brazil silently in my head.
I went inside to call my husband and suggest that he might want to call the city's Forestry office again, just so things didn't get overlooked. The call was interrupted by a knock at the door. Luckily the hard-grafting city workers were self-interested enough to want to avoid having to come back to the same street a couple of weeks later. After making sure I had given permission to take down our tree, they removed it with a minimum of fuss.
And now it's gone!
Actually, they will have to come back another time and remove the stump and plant a new tree (of a different species, presumably), but in the meantime the garden still looks okay without the tree.
2 comments:
Good grief! Well, I wish the town would come and haul off all our trees with canker blogs stuck on them. We have several dozen wild pincherry trees that are affected on ur property. It's a spring ritual to cut the affected pieces off but it feels like a losing battle.
Good for them. I'm glad you had a crew with the gumption to cut some of that tape for you.
I do hope they plant another species. Ash trees are under attack from the Emerald Ash Borer beetle, and the area around Detroit was devastated by them. Better to plant a tree that won't be killed off just as it gets going, right?
But then, city planers and their monoculture plantings may never figure this out.
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