It was around ten in the morning on a cool September, salt-air sort of a Sunday, when the police were summoned to our house.
But wait. I guess I'm getting ahead of myself
To really understand this story, first I'd have to tell you about the tree.
"The tree," as it has come to be known, was something of the maple variety. Perhaps it was a soft or curly, definitely not a sugar. But that doesn't really matter.
What really matters and what the point of the story is, is that we had this tree. It was standing there, tall and proud, in the back corner of the property when we bought the house. And I kid you not... it was the very next day after we signed the papers, and I guess as some sort of a welcome to the neighborhood, that a huge branch fell out of it and landed squarely on our newly purchased fence. Where it remained for the next few weeks until we could get someone with a chainsaw in.
Over the past few years, and I'm guessing due to the blunt force trauma of the loss of one of its limbs, the tree has made a slow and painful decline with Justin & I holding our breath every time even the smallest of storms blew through. Until earlier this year when it finally gave up, sighed its last oxygen-full breath, and didn't sprout any new leaves. And that's when we knew the final arrangements needed to be made. The tree people were called, a date was set.
And that brings us up to yesterday. A cool September, salt-air sort of a Sunday.
The day that will forever be known and live on in infamy, as the day we had the police called on us over a tree.
The charges were simple.
A neighbor heard that we were cutting down the tree and didn't want anything, including the truck needed to cut it, going into their yard. Fair enough.
What followed next, not so much.
The actual police were called. Not a security guard. Not the neighborhood watch. Not an overzealous civilian with a night stick.
No, let's read that again....the ACTUAL POLICE were called. The boys in blue. The fuzz. The po-po. Standing in my backyard. Staring up at this half-cut tree.
And right at that moment.....I could have melted, puddle form, right into the pavement and lived happily for the rest of my days between the cracks in the asphalt if that were even a remote possibility. I mean I was the girl who never even got her name on the board, let alone a check mark. And here we were facing the very likely possibility of a Lohan-esque mugshot in our very near future. With our parents on the evening news, wailing Where did it allllll go wrong??
I ran through the possible charges in my head, to see what kind of trouble we might be facing.
Grand Leafery. Treespassing. Breaking & Splintering
It was not looking good.
But in the end, soft words were spoken. Cooler heads prevailed. Our case was made. And all was smoothed over with the promise for the tree guys to come back another day.
So what's the moral of this story? I guess it's just that this tree has, quite literally, caused trouble for us since day one.
And I for one won't cry a bit when it's gone.
Well that, and sometimes things in this life go so incredibly, dramatically, unexpectedly wrong.....that really, the only thing you can do is laugh.
If that's what keeps you from crying. :)
***The good news is that yesterday was not all bad, as we were incredibly honored to have a four-part feature on Style Me Pretty as part of their new "At Home" series that will be running every Sunday. We were lucky enough to be part of the creative team on the first ever SMP inspiration to reality shoot a couple years ago, and then again the following year on the first ever SMP inspiration to real wedding shoot down in Nashville. So when our good friend Abby Larson, the editor of SMP, told us about their new At Home series and said she wanted to do an inspiration to real party shoot....we were all over it. Justin drove up to Abby & Tait's home outside of Boston and shot all of the killer details for their Surprise Party Soiree. They had such amazing, yet easy to do ideas for taking a normal party and really adding in the wow factor. You can check out all four parts & all of their amazing ideas here:Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV . Enjoy!!
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