Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Whew! My birthday is over and now I have to live with the results: Another year older an deeper in debt, as the old song says. I still have more celebrations to come: dinner tomorrow night with friends, my older son and his family and younger daughter and her family for brunch Saturday, lunch out with another friend next week. We've gone from presents to flowers or less, because none of us needs a thing. In fact, we're all trying to get rid of stuff. Today we had a tree guy out to see about trimming our many trees, and I love listening to him. He's an arborist, and educates us about the trees we have, like the Scottish Yew, the Beech tree and many more. Back at the time our house was built, 1909, it was popular to plant Scottish Yew trees on either side of the front porch, sometimes even with the third tree in the middle, but all that has survived is one on the corner of the porch. Now the PGE person wants us to cut it down so he can put in a new smartmeter for gas. We'll see which is more costly: cutting it down or having a new meter put in. The thing is, it affords us privacy from the neighbor on that side, whose house and yard is a mess. They are always working on it, and nothing ever gets done. It looks like a construction site, with junk everywhere and the back yard a wreck. We've taken out a door, installed smoked windows and blocked our view on the side in every way possible. The neighbors are nice, but evidently have no need to have their place look like a loved house. The owner of our house before we bought it shrugged his shoulders. He couldn't explain it and decades later nothing has changed. Very strange.