Attack of Angry Forest

The land around our house was carved out of the forest almost 25 years ago and ever since then the forest has been trying to take it back. For the last month it has pelted the house with acorns and branches. The barrage goes on all day and all night, peppering the roof, the deck, banging against the grill and the wheelbarrow, and God forbid there’s a wind, you’d think the trees were simply coming after you! I have not set foot in the backyard in over a month. It is too dangerous. Remember that scene in ‘The Wizard of Oz” when they get the trees to throw the apples? It feels like that but there are about a hundred acorns for every apple and they really hurt! When we first moved in 13 years ago, we got sunlight on the lawn until the late hours of a summer afternoon. Now, we’re lucky if we get a single shaft of light after 1 p.m. According to the satellite photos of the area, we are not here. There were two massive trees with bases that are at least 6 feet in diameter, with trunks that split into huge trunks sharing a common base: Siamese Trees! Now there is one, cabled at the top to keep it from falling on the house that it dwarfs. We had to put the other one to sleep after an 85 foot limb broke off, crashed across our lawn, killed the basketball hoop and attacked the Prius. As if the trees aren’t enough, the previous owner of the house was a landscape architect and planted perennials everywhere. This was a recurring treat at first; all through the spring plants and flowers would sprout and surprise us with colors we never had in Brooklyn! And they would grow, and grow, and flop over, and the weeds would come, and we would pull them, and pull them, and they would keep coming. And then the leaves would fall, and fall, and fall, and we would rake and blow them back and I would pack boxes and boxes of autumn leaves and ship them off to a nursery school in Florida so children who didn’t know what a season was could experience the joys of playing in autumn leaves and pulling ticks off their skin and flirting with Lyme Disease. The leaves we didn’t ship away were blown into the forest until the perimeter was so high we couldn’t blow them anymore so our plot of land would get a little smaller every year. But now it seems the forest is no longer content with the slow reclamation of the property via weeds and leaves. The trees are attacking us with everything they have. An acorn, falling from a hundred-foot tree is a deadly missile. When a branch falls, the earth moves. We have been lucky so far. The branches that have done the most damage have fallen the days following social gatherings, as if to say they will tolerate us on their property but no one else. They just don’t like parties! And so we hunker down in the house and wait for the trees to exhaust their supply of projectiles. It will be winter soon and the leaves and acorns will be gone and it will be safe to venture outside again… to shovel the snow. Remind me why I moved to New England.