Our lovely neighbor cut a Christmas tree in our garden when we were vacationing in the US.
I always check our garden when we return from holidays, but this time I stumbled on a very pleasant surprise: one of our Christmas trees, decapitated — or rather: dismembered, ripped apart, halved. (It still lived for a couple of years in its new handicapped form, but eventually passed away.)
The youngest daughter of our neighbors — Ebba, with whom I’d had a relationship for a while — warned me about her father:
“He is an absolute brute and really hates the litter that your trees produce. Be careful with that man. He doesn’t take no for an answer — nor another opinion than his own, for that matter.”
(She knew what she was talking about, because he kicked her out of the house when she was 16. She mixed with the wrong people, and had a boyfriend who spent some time in jail. Her father’s solution was throwing her on the street, instead of helping her. Her mother hardly said anything, as usual.)
So we contacted our NPT (Neighborhood Policing Team), and a friendly police officer reprimanded our neighbor, and tried to talk some sense into his lowlife brain.
It didn’t work out, though (as we had expected).
Some time later he sued us in small claims court, and demanded that all of our big trees (birches and a cedar tree) be cut — as he had illegally done with our beloved Christmas tree. After the judge visited his property to inspect our crimes for himself, he kindly explained our neighbor that no trees would be cut, and that he must behave.
Subsequently, our neighbor entered a new stage of bewilderment, and started emptying buckets of his own pee into our backyard.
That is the kind of man he is, unfortunately: a tub full of urine —
And quite reeking, if I may say.
