DO NOT SCREW WITH MY BUSHES!

Fine, that title can be taken in several ways both perverse (um, you know) and perverse (as in the so-called president). BUT, it is not in reference to either. We have tall bushes along the boundary line of our neighbor's yard. They are clearly on our property. Overall, this neighbor is very nice (with the exception of the very very loud fights between neighbor's daughter and derelict boyfriend at 2 a.m.). She is always obsessively and compulsively working on her yard. I'll give her credit, it does look nice (with the exception of the Virgin Mary and Jesus statues). However, her obsessive compulsiveness HAS CROSSED THE LINE.

We did a lot of trimming of our shrubbery this summer, including the bushes along the property line. Due to Finnegan's cancer treatment and my spectacular fracture, we could not keep up with the yard as much as we would like. Our yard does look acceptable. It is not overgrown, there are not many weeds, and we have not been cited by the city like some people I will not mention who live across the street from us and who are not familiar with this fancy new invention called the lawn mower. That is besides the point. One day, my husband noticed that OCD neighbor or her semi-derelict son (who is all chatty-Cathy when my husband and I are outside doing yard work)* had not cut but BUTCHERED our bushes by lobbing off any branch that DARED CROSS OVER THE FENCE and dropped the offending branches on our side of the fence on or within the bushes. It looked horrible because she/he did not just trim, she/he cut way back about a foot over on our side of the property. From what I understand, one can legally trim his/her neighbor's tree or shrubbery which encroaches on one's property so long as it does not cause damage to the tree or shrubbery.

Here's the problem: besides making the tree look hideous, it made the bushes tip all the way over, almost to the ground when we had our lovely snow storm. You see, trees and shrubbery grow in a very balanced, perhaps zen-like, manner. Ommmm. When you trim one side, you need to trim the other side equally. By massacring the bushes, it caused some serious damage. Hopefully, we can salvage the bushes by trimming off some of the branches on our side.

Long story short: DO NOT TOUCH MY SHRUBBERY!

*Note: generally, we are not all chatty with people we barely know even if they live next to us. Just because we live next to you, doesn't mean we want to talk to you every time we step out of our front door.