The current efficiency of the world continues to amaze me. Tuesday Davy Tree (under contract to the city) came along the street, trimming branches that might impinge on wires. (Front lawn trees belong to the city by fiat, even if the city didn't actually plant them themselves as they did mine.) I went veg shopping, confident that when I got back I'd find the birch tree no longer twining its branches about the hydro and ready to bring it down in an ice storm; returned to find it untouched while the truck had moved up to the next block. Caught up with them and made enquiries. I wasn't on their list. 'Call 311 and tell the city.' Do. (Efficiency #1- no half hour wait.) City says their cutters can't handle branches that touch electric as opposed to Bell wires. It's Hydro's bailiwick; Davy Tree doesn't have the equipment for it. Call Hydro, report birch tree, gruff voice says they'll send someone to look. Yesterday I come home on my break to find Hydro just finishing up and bro and s-i-l on porch watching the show. S-i-l is displeased that Hydro will only cut the branches that impinge on wires and not trim the other side of the tree for balance; Hydro guy says they can only cut city trees if they actually threaten Hydro's wires. But even with all this territoriality, one day to get results amazes me.
More worrying is next door's insistence that when tree #1, an ironwood close to the house, failed to leaf for two years straight, the city cut it down and planted the birch. I have no memory of them cutting it down, or of there being a stump with small shoot that remained, which in the third year started to grow again and is now roof-high. It makes *sense* that they'd do that instead of leaving a dead tree on my property: but *I* remember a sizable tree (eight years old by then) suddenly bursting into leaf after two years not, and me being here for all of it. S-i-l says they cut it when she moved in, mid-90s- says there was nothing but a stump; where I'm certain it was after I came back, sometime in 98 or 99. One or both of us is seriously confused. And I can't believe we got from stump to three storeys in fifteen years.
