Open letter to my nosy neighbor(s)

6jan2

Hi Neighbor,

Just a friendly request to PLEASE PUT THOSE LEAVES BACK ON THE TREES WHERE THEY BELONG, AND STOP LEAVING THEM ON THE CURB. Lately, it has been noticed that great heaping bags of sweating leaves have been piled up at the edge of your yard on the curb and left to sit for days at a time. While we understand that some loss of leaves is natural every autumn, it is frowned upon for leaves to continue to fall into the new year, and for you to bundle them up and leave them bagged and abandoned on the curb. Not only does it detract from the uniform tidiness of the rest of the block, but by leaving your trees bare, you are subjecting your home and your neighbors to an increased level of sunlight, which can both bleach roof shingles and cause skin cancer.

It is a well-known fact that there are “trees” living on the blocks just north of us that never lose their leaves, except for when they spit out those brown needles that, when they accumulate in great enough numbers, can cause a person in house shoes to slip and fall and moan unattractively and unsuccessfully for help. On numerous occasions we have been duped by these brown needles of death, and the city has been notified several times of the danger they pose to unsuspecting busybodies creeping through neighborhoods at night to sift through trash bins. If your trees are losing their leaves so fully that you are still bagging them once January rolls around, it is advisable that you take a look at how you are caring for these trees and perhaps change your tree-care habits.

We take great pride in our neighborhood and hope you will join us in our effort to uphold leaves as inherent parts of trees that should never be neglected enough that they want to fall to the ground and be stuffed into plastic bags and left at the curb. By returning these leaves to their rightful places on the branches of your trees, you’ll be doing your part to help keep our neighborhood looking great!

Thank you in advance for listening to a bossy-ass piece of paper, which was certainly not made out of any tree-related products.

(Background is here.)

4 thoughts on “Open letter to my nosy neighbor(s)

  1. This reminds me of one of the great surprises I had when I moved to Nashville–if it ain’t in the bin, it ain’t gettin’ picked up. Recycling once a month and lawn debris once per quarter (and you don’t get any notice when it will be). In Memphis, you could haul anything short of a dead body out to the curb and rest assured some nice union-dues-paying man would take it away. Not so in Nashville. And leaves have to be in compostable bags (which is a good rule). So when I first moved here, I had to pay someone to come and haul away my bags of lawn debris for about $100. Memphians have no idea how good they have it.

    Incidentally, I think cars parked there would look far more tidy than those awful PLASTIC bags of leaves that will never meet their maker.

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