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I am not a morning person.

I am not the kind of guy who wakes up before the sun rises and puts on jogging clothes. I do not sit at my desk at six a.m. to plot out my day or update a shopping list. I don’t read the morning paper. In fact, the last time I saw the sun rise was about ten weeks ago, when I stayed out so late kissing a woman in my car that I witnessed the sky lighten.

So imagine the pain behind my eyes when I wake to the grinding sounds of chainsaws and trucks and wood chippers. My neighbors have contracted three burly men to methodically grind a thirty-year-old tree into pulp. Giant pencils of wood are loudly digested by whirling steel blades, while from the other side a river of wood is projectile-vomited into the back of a truck.

As I look out my window now, a man with no hat sits atop a metal arm tying rope to one of three central branches. In a few minutes it will come crashing to the ground. That’s the best part, hearing a tree collide with the earth. But why must they start before seven in the morning?

It’s bad enough I have to experience to the audible morning at all. Sanitation trucks and road construction crews. Engines revving in the cold. Commuters honking for their car pools. Children waiting for the school bus, and their dogs barking. At this hour it’s beyond painful to hear car alarms, but worse to suffer the painful, pointless 59 minutes of a vacationing neighbor’s screaming alarm clock before it shuts itself up. Better I should hear live trees whittled to toothpicks?

So here’s my request for the world: From now on, there will be no tree killing before 10 a.m. Let the nice plants live for the last hours of their lives in harmony with the rest of the world, and with me.

That’s all. I’m going back to sleep.

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Copyright 2002 Seth Maislin

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