Chainsaws have given way to the throatier, meaner sounds of mulchers and chippers, large metal contraptions towed along behind the almost-too-big-for-these-narrow-streets trucks with Davey in screaming yellow letters on the side. Every once in a while, there’ll be a smaller truck trolling the neighborhood with words like “Pete’s Tree Trimming Services” or “Hector’s Trees” hand-painted on dented and dinged doors. I’ve come to regard them as vultures, like the wreckers that sit ildly by on IH-35, just waiting for that accident and the quick cash that will accompany it. Peckers, all of them. I was hauling one of about fifteen wheelbarrows full of less-than-five-foot lengths of dead branches to the curb for the City to pick up (hopefully before Christmas) when a man in an old Dodge Ram stopped and got out of his truck.

“You have some trees that need to be cut?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I didn’t add “thanks” or “sorry.” Just, “No.”

But that was a lie. I still have one huge branch and a fifteen foot splintered phallus of a trunk standing deliriously and stupidly erect in my backyard. Yes, in fact, I did have a tree that needed to be cut. But I wasn’t going to pay, um–as he drives off I can read “JBs Tree Trimming and Yard Detail”–I’m not going to pay you, JB (I guess it’s JB driving, anyway), to cut it. I will do it myself because I can. And in the evenings, when I am too tired to cut anymore or, more logically, because it’s too dark to cut anymore, I will patiently lick the rashes and welts that the stinging oak leaves have stratched into my arms. Yes, JB, I have trees that need to be cut. Thanks for asking.

At two o’clock on Sunday morning, dead of night, pitch black out, a convoy of City vehicles congregated on my street, their diesel engines idling, persistent, clacking, gravelly, like a group of old men hacking and harrumphing over cigars and bourdon. Fashionably attired in nothing but Old Navy boxers (red grid on white field) and a red Hanes T-shirt, I wandered outside, skinny white-man half-awake, grumpy. They’re all up and down the street, those City vehicles. It’s like they’ve all pulled onto a side street to get ready for the big parade, only instead of cowgirls and band majors, the street is teeming with large men wearing yellow hardhats and plaid flannel shirts. Didn’t they know the grunge look was pass