Now there were six fresh stumps lined up in the dirt.
Perfectly flat cuts. Clean. Professional. The branches had already been hauled away. Even the sawdust had mostly been cleared, as if someone had tried to tidy up the crime scene before leaving. As if someone had understood, at some level, that what they’d done required cleanup.
Mara stood near the fence line with her arms folded tightly across her chest. She was wearing her work clothes—yoga instructor attire, which meant she’d left her studio to come here, to witness whatever I was about to witness, to try to make sense of it before I arrived.
She didn’t say I’m sorry. She didn’t say this is terrible or awful or unbelievable.
She just shook her head. “I tried to stop them.”
“What do you mean you tried to stop them?”
She explained that two trucks arrived late that morning—company logos on the doors, workers wearing orange safety shirts and hard hats, equipment that made professional cutting sounds. She walked over and asked what they were doing. One of the men told her they were “just following the work order.”
“Whose work order?” she asked.
“Cedar Ridge Estates HOA.”
I blinked. I tried to process what she’d just said, tried to make the words arrange themselves into something that made sense.
Cedar Ridge Estates sits on the ridge above my land. A gated development that had popped up about five years ago—stone entrance sign, decorative fountain that ran even during drought restrictions, massive houses with equally massive opinions about how the landscape should look and what views they were entitled to from their multimillion-dollar properties.
“We’re not part of Cedar Ridge,” I said. “We’ve never been part of Cedar Ridge.”
“Exactly,” Mara replied.
A business card had been tucked under my windshield wiper that morning. She still had it, pulled it out of her pocket. Summit Tree & Land Management. A phone number. A website promising professional landscaping and land management services.
I called the number with hands that felt calmer than the anger building inside me—the kind of controlled rage that comes from understanding that something precious has been destroyed and that the people responsible didn’t even think to ask permission first.
A man answered after two rings.
“Summit Tree, this is Brad.”
“Brad,” I said evenly, “why did your crew cut down six sycamore trees on my property this morning?”
