The story below is a preview from our July/August 2017 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
It’s a wonderful city we live in. Could it be even better if all of it were as exactingly refined as a daylily bed out there by the garbage cans?
Kurt Rheinheimer
So one day out in the alley, where Gail has worked for years to create and maintain a tidy, healthy bed of daylilies, there’s a paper sign on a wooden stick, sunk down into them.
It talks about weeds blocking the alley and the possibility of a citation and other official city stuff, right there under official city letterhead.
And we’re like, whaaaaat?!
The offending plants are maybe 18 inches tall, and their intrusion into the alley, so far as we can discern, is that the outermost row might, by virtue of its collective bend, be suspended perhaps an inch, in spots, over the border between the soil and the edge of the alley’s paving.
We call the guy whose name is on the notice to express our incredulousness, and he’s like hey, I’ll be right out to talk about it.
Which he is. He explains to us about the big trucks needing to get through the alley to get to the garbage cans and the recycling cans, and about how anything that extends over the pavement is an impediment.
C’mon, a few pieces of daylily foliage?
Yes, we must be consistent with the notices. (Farther down the alley, some giant evergreens reach a quarter of the way across the alley, which we had assumed to be the focus of the note at the front of the house a week or so before the alley notice.)
In the end, he says his supervisor said he could remove our notice.
After a few days and at my suggestion, Gail took pair of scissors out there and clipped the offending leaf pieces anyway.
All of which got me thinking about our fine tidy city and if its overall fineness and tidiness were extended to the level of what was mandated out in the alley.
... for the rest of this story and more from our July/August 2017 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!