An Act of God.... Really

We had a pretty bad storm Friday night. Waco got thrashed by a tornado and our city had barely any damage.

Almost.

We had a 30 foot rotted tree that was "growing" on our property and sometime in the night it just sorta fell over.
Into the neighbor's fence.
And destroyed it.

"It's an act of God," Shawn said. "They can't sue us. I looked it up."

"It's an act of God that it fell in that direction and not towards our house!" I laughed.

Truly, we were blessed and both relieved to have the tree come down so we didn't have to worry about it anymore. Our neighbor across the street helped Shawn chop it up with a chaisaw and haul it to the curb. (You'd think that much rotten wood would be pretty light. It wasn't) Meanwhile I picked up sticks and garbage in the back at which point I landed on a black and yellow snake.

Shawn, The Great White Hunter, successfully killed the menace.

In our three years of living here, no ones lived in the house next door. The owner checks on it now and then and that's about it. For the first couple years, he'd catch me coming home from work and gripe and complain till the sun came down about our trees growing into his yard.

One peek yesterday into his back yard and we were astounded. The grass had grown up level to the roof of the house. A year or so ago we killed a family of snakes near the dead tree. Between his yard being grown up and our dark cool spot, Hmmm, I wonder how we keep getting snakes?

The neighbor is a strange cat. He's never happy with anything we do trying to please him and his yard keep up even though he had a rainforest growing in the back.

The lady 2 houses down keeps up the front yard so we told her about the tree and fence and she apparently called the owner within 30 seconds.

That stressed me out a bit because I know how this guy is. He's a bit of a nut and I was worried how he might react to the fence, which by the way, has been completely rotten since we moved in.

"Tell him to get the fence appraised," I told Shawn. "If he throws a fit, I'll give him five bucks for it."

Luckily when the owner arrived, Shawn and our other nieghbor had everything cleaned up already. They had to cut a path just to get our neighbor's backyard. The guy didn't throw a fit in front of our chainsaw owning neighbor (thank Heaven!) and went off to talk to one of the other neighbors who was interested in buying the house.

As I helped Shawn pick up the smaller chunks (what I could carry) we over heard the conversation going on between the to old guys.

"...well you could probably find some black family to buy it cheap!" one said.

As Shawn and I were dumping logs on the curb I hissed at him, "Did hear what that one said!"

"I heard 'im!" Shawn laughed.

"Nazis!" I exclaimed. "What a bunch of facists! Like a little diversity would kill 'em!"

I hope a black family would buy that house. Or a Mexican family. Or an Asian family. Or whatever!

Either way, I bet they'd mow the back yard more often than once a year.