I am having a personal crisis of conscience:  I love trees, I really do, but I want evil things to happen to one particular example of flora in the neighbor’s yard.  Less than a year ago I spent an entire morning precariously balanced on a 1950’s vintage wooden step-ladder, pulling pine needles out of the gutters of our new home, saying dirty words the whole time.  With that experience fresh in my mind, I had some limbs trimmed a few months later that were on my side of the fence and hanging over our roof so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the downspouts clogging.  The best laid plans of mice and men…   Just because I have a smidgen of OCD, I did my yearly gutter/shingle inspection and upon popping my head up above the edge of the roof, I almost had an aneurism!  Every gutter on the south end on the house (under the neighbor’s tree) was filled to overflowing with fvcking pine needles.  Son of a….  I spent four hours raking my yard/pulling debris from the gutters and plotting the murder of a pine tree.   Driving my hate was the realization that I have spent a week of Sundays and $1000+ engaged in a losing battle with this conifer.  Are there hit men for trees?  Would they make its demise look like an accident?  How would a tree “slip in the tub” or “leave the gas on?”

It is really not the tree’s fault.  I am the interloper.  I am the higher ape with a Machiavellian need for order in my yard.  The tree is just being.  I realize these things on a intellectual level, but all that flies out the window the second I see a heap brown needles in my soft, green perfect grass, I start day dreaming of copper nails and the sweet lullaby of chainsaws.