What Happened to The Tree: A Story of Love and Loss

Our poor next-door neighbors’ house is completely filled with mold. We’re not exactly sure what happened, but we do know that there was always a trail of water that came from the house. So last week, they upped and moved out. Now there is a big sign on their door that says “Mold infestation, keep out”. I really feel for them; it must have been scary to be living their lives completely oblivious, and the next day seeing workers exclusively enter your house once they are fully geared up in their hazmat suits. Not to mention the total hassle to move out of your house right before finals week- yuck. 

Whatever the cause was, the result has been a lot of movers, city utility workers, and landscaping people coming in and out of the house and standing around their yard. A few days ago, I even came home to a man up in a bucket cutting down giant branches off of the tree that acted as a canopy for the house- and I loved that tree! It’s a big beautiful oak tree that sometimes hits me in the head with its acorns as I cross over the yard en route to my front door. It has been so fun to see its leaves change from giant green fronds to a reddish brown, paperlike leaf. To be honest, I’m not a mold expert, but I can’t imagine how a few branches of a big and beautiful tree would have affected what was going on inside the house. It made me so sad to see the tree that I see outside of my kitchen every morning be cut, its branches haphazardly thrown into a giant red dumpster that has made itself at home in the front yard. 

Because the men were cutting and shaking the tree, many of its leaves fell. This made it so that the ground on the neighbor’s side of the yard filled up at a much quicker rate than the ground on my side of the yard. And it did so in a near-perfect line. It is almost commercial how our yards are now separated by a line of wonderful red leaves. We don’t have landscapers who tend to our grass (as demonstrated by the mud filling our yard), so I know that no one blew leaves from our yard away. The leaves simply stayed on the side from which they fell. It’s honestly kind of amazing.

Thankfully, the tree still stands, it’s just a little different now: fewer giant arms reaching out and welcoming me home, giant gaping holes and circles of lighter wood that used to be the intersect of trunk and branch. If the tree was the culprit for the mold, then do what you must, Mister Worker Man. But please don’t use a vacant house as an opportunity to get some yard work done, some of us like it overgrown and natural.