We had a very crazy moving day. My friend was having a memorial for her stillborn Trisomy 18 son. My MIL was in town to help with the move, we asked a friend to stay at our old house with the movers because we had the memorial to attend. We did all of this.

We threw Soleil in a box. Because we could. We slowly got the house together. My friend’s mother-in-law and mine set up our kitchen. I still don’t get how they set it up.

On April 6, I finally got around to hanging a shower curtain that wasn’t musty in our shower. As I stood on my tiptoes on a step stool to hang the pressure rod, my calf muscle ripped. I heard it before I felt it. I spent the remainder of my birthday in the hospital trying to determine if I broke a bone, ripped the Achilles or if I had ripped the muscle. 3rd degree tear. I was on crutches for weeks.

The house next to ours had sold about the same time ours did. We moved in about the same time. The owners were Ray and Julie (not their real names) and they were a quiet couple. We had decided against that house because it was so big, and it needed lots of repairs. Every room needed to be repainted in ours, but in that house, every room also needed wall repairs. They spent the first year fixing up the interior while we tried to do the same while I hobbled on crutches.

One day, we saw that Julie was marking trees on their yard with orange ribbons. We went over and asked. They were planning to remove a few trees because their basement was so wet. (huh?) Julie explained that the trees must be preventing the sun from soaking up the water in the ground, therefore, they were removing trees (anyone else see the problem here? Anyone???) We were concerned because our yard is lower than theirs and some of the trees they marked were close to our border. We drew up an agreement that if we agreed for them to remove three trees that were at the edge of the property, they would replace it with a flowering tree. We came home one day and found the trees gone. About 30 trees. The beautifully treed property was now just filled with stumps.

We couldn’t believe it. All stumps. Yucky dead stumps. We were shocked by the loss. It was as if someone had ripped out our souls. It was horrifying. I admit, I cried. Over the next few weeks, Jay would talk with Ray about things. Turns out, he didn’t want to pay for stump removal. He didn’t realize how horrible it would look. Then after about 5 weeks, they got the property surveyed.

The front corner where we had been mowing was suddenly revealed to be on THEIR side, but the three trees that they removed, the ones we signed an agreement about? Completely, totally on our property. OMG! The survey was so they could level the land and remove the stumps. Because the three stumps were on "our side" they refused to remove them. And they started to yell at us for mowing the front corner.

good.

(Images from GlobeXplorer (copywrited?)

April 2001

We were so upset by the turn of events, that we bought three trees to put on that side of our property, two evergreens and 1 Japanese dogwood. Julie screamed at us when they were planted. "We just got rid of the stupid trees! How dare you plant them so close to our property!" I was good. I WANTED to give her the finger, but I didn’t. I was good.

(see why we were upset? SEE???)