So, You’ve Got A Problem With The Trees?
A letter to an old bag, and why it is imperative to humanity’s survival that we learn again to live with the trees.
So you’ve got a problem with the trees then. The leaves fall from the mature silver birch outside your house. They fall on the path and your car, and you’ve got to spend your valuable afternoons sweeping them up. Maybe not so much these days, given that life has left you with a broken body. But when you were younger and more abrasive than you are now perhaps. Now, their persistence serves merely to allow you to vent your frustration for longer.
The local council gives you bags for organic waste and collect the filled ones regularly — but it’s no good. The very next day, the street is full of leaves again. The local road sweeper comes about once per month, but that’s hardly enough at the height of Autumn either.
In the Spring it’s unbearable too. The disinfectant sap from the trees falls like light rain on your car, and the sticky substance attracts all kinds of insects. Her intolerable seedpods catch the wind and gather in all kinds of places. The jackdaws, magpies, blackbirds, woodpigeons and starlings cause a hell of a racket at 5 am. You consider it all a woeful inconvenience and you’d rather they were gone, cut down!
