To the Editor:
Some things in life transcend dollars and cents. The feeling of home is one such thing. A home is more than lumber, plumbing, and assorted nests of wires – it’s a personal expression of our intimate feelings.
We lay out our homes with little flourishes of personal taste and we do it with love. It’s “our space,” designed and landscaped with our eye for personal expression.
Over time a person’s home comes to feel more like a limb of the body, with memories, marked events in life, and a general warmness of sentiment; more than a simple pile of boards cobbled together. We plant trees, shrubs, and prune what needs pruning, depending on our own taste.
So when someone comes in with orders to obliterate what we’ve created over the years, we find outselves justifiably angry. Case in point, the recent clearing of roadside trees along the Bristol Road area.
No one can argue that in order to maintain the flow of power to area homes, steps must be taken to safeguard lines and equipment, but does this mean that common courtesy gets cast aside for homeowners, while a veritable clear-cut operation levels a path of sheared timber, leaving in its wake tangles of brush and gnawed stumps.
A reasonable person might trust in a large company such as CMP to take into consideration the feelings of homeowners when their trees “some decades old or older” are sawed to the ground in front of their eyes with little or no regard for the occupant’s wishes.
It’s tough to battle city hall, as they say, and the state as well as CMP does have the law on its side – even when hired guns are allowed to run amok with chainsaws on its behalf, at the end of the day it’s really about common courtesy, as mentioned.
People, as a rule, will more often than not be willing to compromise in tough situations. Would it have slowed or halted those contracted to clear trees along the roadway to have worked together with homeowners – in this case my good pal Storm Hildebrandt – on coming to a simple agreement of claiming only those trees that posed threat to the power lines – as opposed to shearing to the ground each and every roadside tree along her property? I think not.
