Killing A Perfectly Healthy Tree; Dealing With Neighbors

MOST AMERICANS don't know their neighbors, nor care to. Part of that is our society constantly on the move, part of it is our national penchant for self absorption. We the American people tend to tolerate our neighbors, and to live with a sort of precarious truce, being smart enough to fully appreciate the immense value and expediency of being on good terms with those geographically close by, if not on speaking terms. I became friends with all the kids in my neighborhood when I was a kid in the sixties; we played baseball together for hours each day during summer vacation, remindful of a lost post world war America of the nineteen fifties and sixties. Hell, when I was five years old, my older sister and I would leave the house in the morning, be gone all day, and my mom had no specific idea where we were nor what we were doing, but wasn't concerned, until we came home for supper at dusk. We were in and out of neibhbor's houses, all over the block, with no adult concern, even though in those days the crime rate was far higher than now, but you didn't constantly see crime on twenty four hour news programs. Nowadays that lifestyle would mean jail time for the parents and foster care for the kids. Nowadays kids have cell phones attached to their clothing and microchips impanted in their skulls, so it is rumored, and mom hovers like a helicopter, hence the term "helicopter parent". I bought my first and only house at fifty, paid it off in fifteen years, and intend to die there, not for awhile I hope. Although I have lived there sixteen years, I barely know my neighbors. Their chidren have grown up and left home without my paying any attention. My next door neighbor has a barky, snappy litttle pomeranian or something, who used to have the unpleasant habit of running headlong into my yard, barking and snapping, and chasing my seven outdor cats out of their own yard. I finally made an oblique refeenrce to the problem this posed. She started keeping the little shit in her fenced in back yard, put up a privacy fence between our houses, and stopped speaking to me. How dare me protect my seven formerly stray cats (its the only kind I have, the only kind to have) from being terrifired in and chased out of their own yard! My neighbors across the street the are Jehovah's Witnessses, and too weird to befriend, although I have, and do, speaking kindly to them when I see them every few months. My best friend among my neighbors is a hard working guy from Guatemala and his wife. He has his own business renovating houses, and works all the time. He and I were once close, but no longer are, mainly becuase I got tired of alwasys interreupting him when he was either getting ready to go to work, or coming home after working all day. My neighbor catty-corner from me lives in a newish house, rather like mine, but has, or rather had, a weather beaten privacy fence and a huge beautiful tree in her back yard. I have only spoken to her once; she likes sports. Suddenly, recently, she tore down her privacy fence, cut down the huge beautiful tree, and then built another privacy fence where the old one was. I wish she had left the tree and not replaced the privacy fence, but, after all, she is an American. I love trees and hate privacy fences, but, have learned to endure them, for want of any alternative. I do not plan to discuss sports, nor anything else with her, ever again.