Welcome to the Neighborhood! (sans sarcasm)

Although we didn’t have any of our own, the backyard of our last house was surrounded by massive trees, which liked to drop their huge branches on our side of the fence whenever the wind blew. And I also suspect that some of those large branches were manually placed in our yard while I was away at work. In ten years the neighbor that lives directly behind our house has never waved or even looked me in the eye.

Maybe that's why I hated those trees. Clearing the yard after storms felt like doing community service.

With that in mind, I was very surprised to see this scene when I got home from work on Friday:

The fallen tree was gone! You couldn't even see any wood chips. All that was left to mark the tree's existence was the empty ring of landscaping bricks. The branches in our back yard were missing, too. How did that happen? I know Daphne called five different tree services to get their estimates, but the 70 mph winds had left them all backed up with work. One company would spend their whole weekend working full time on just one street in Urbandale.

There wasn't a note left on our door to explain what happened to the tree, and there weren't any messages on our answering machine, either. Still, mystery or not, I was almost giddy. A whole tree blew into our yard, and we didn't have to lift a finger to clean up the mess?

Turns out, our new neighbor was responsible. She got home around midnight on Thursday evening, so it was too late to knock on our door. We left for school before she could catch us on Friday morning, so she couldn't tell us that she had called in a favor, and the tree would be gone by noon.

She told us "I called my insurance guy, and boy did he p.ss me off. He said the tree was an "act of God", and since it was in your yard, I didn't have to worry about it. I told him, 'It's MY tree! They just moved in five days ago. I can't drop a tree on them!'" She wouldn't even split the cost of the tree removal with us.

That wouldn't have happened in our old neighborhood. A tree may have fallen down, but things are looking up.