Unless.

Our teeny backyard was lined with overgrown Canadian hemlocks when we bought it.  On the one hand, it was a ridiculous pretend forest, considering that we were moving from two acres that were surrounded by actual woods, from a yard that was basically a big, beautiful field, often visited by wild turkeys and deer, for starters.  But on the other hand, that line of messy hemlocks was better than no trees, and it gave us the illusion of privacy.  I liked waking up and looking out my bedroom window to see a wall of green.  But over the past few years, as Todd started outdoor home improvement in earnest, we wondered whether the illusion of privacy was worth the bigger yard that we were missing.

Here's what I mean: the distance from the back of our house to that line of green was the same as the distance from the line of green to our neighbors' fences.  The same.  And in between were tangled, bare branches and, aside from shelter for the chipmunks and squirrels our cat Oliver hunts, wasted space.  So we started to talk about taking them down and replacing them with something less bushy and more spindly.  And it was all talk until last month when Todd rented a wood chipper and called Abe, his amazing and generous partner in Do-It-Yourself, and they cut down the trees in one day.

They didn't cut them all down.  We spared the biggest one in the middle, and when we move the playground out of what is now the middle of our backyard, there will be a happy climbing tree on its left.  And we kept the trees surrounding our shed, too.  So now our backyard has doubled in size, and now we have way more room to get up to nonsense that all of our neighbors can more easily see and hear!