When the heavy diesel trucks pulled into my driveway on Monday morning, my heart instantly sank. A county tree crew had showed up completely unannounced with a work order to take down my magnificent bur oak.
My husband and I planted that very tree the spring we built this house decades ago.
It wasn’t just a piece of landscaping to me; it was a living monument to our life together. We had watched it grow from a fragile sapling into a towering giant that shaded our front yard, its roots firmly gripping the earth just as we had anchored ourselves in this community.
I wasn’t about to just stand on the porch and let them destroy it without a fight. I walked out to meet the foreman, a young guy who looked like he was barely out of his twenties. He was already waving around a clipboard, shouting orders at his crew, and acting like he owned the entire street.
When I approached him to ask what was going on, he barely made eye contact. He just tapped his pen against his clipboard and explained that the county easement ran right through the trunk of my oak, meaning they had every legal right to saw it down to the stump to clear the way for some new utility lines.
“Nothing to be done, ma’am,” he told me, cutting off my questions before I could even get them out. And trust me, he said the word “ma’am” in that perfectly condescending, patronizing tone that some men use when they really just mean “clueless old woman.” He looked at my silver hair, my gardening clothes, and my quiet demeanor, and he clearly decided I was just going to be a minor, easily managed annoyance in his busy workday.
He expected me to cry, or complain, or maybe threaten to call the police, only to eventually retreat to my living room while his crew fired up the chainsaws. I didn’t argue with him. I didn’t yell, and I didn’t cause a scene. I just nodded, took a long look at the heavy machinery idling near my beautiful tree, and walked calmly back inside my house.
What that arrogant young foreman didn’t know—and couldn’t possibly have guessed—is that I worked as a surveyor for this exact county for thirty-eight years. I didn’t just live in this town; I mapped it. I dragged chains through the mud in the pouring rain, I fought through briar patches to find lost property corners, and I practically knew the dirt in this county by its first name.
In fact, I was the one who platted half the road we were standing on, including my own property line. I knew exactly what had happened just by glancing at the blurry copy of the plat attached to his clipboard. Their easement was perfectly real—I wasn’t delusional about the law—but it sat exactly fourteen feet east of where his map claimed it did.
