Neighbors, the flip side

Sometimes, it's the ones you'd never dream of who cause you the most trouble. My house has a business behind, a house on one side and on the other, a church. I figured that would mean I only had one chance for ending up with neighbor trouble. Imagine my surprise to find myself in a property dispute...with the church! No one from the church has even come over to welcome me to the neighborhood but they made sure to wait until I was at work to come chop down a walnut tree in my yard. Luckily my sister happened to see it happening and ran over to stop them. Unfortunately, she could only convince them to "trim" the tree since they're claiming it belongs to them. If by trim you mean whacking off the entire left half of the tree, leaving a bizarre looking, mutilated corpse, then yes, they sure did trim the tree.

I don't have the money to pay for an official survey and haven't had the time to go to the court house to view the lot maps so I haven't bothered to confront them about it. While I don't attend church, I have strong morals and values that center around generally being a good person and being kind to others, so it's mind-boggling to me that the members of this church would ignore a new neighbor and then try to cut down my tree without even talking to me about it. Their reason for cutting it down is so silly- they don't like the messy walnuts. It's a healthy, living thing and you want to cut it down because it's getting your shoes dirty one day a week? Really? Is that what we're calling a Christian attitude these days? I've only owned the place for a few days and before they started this, I'd been sweeping their parking lot figuring that it was the nice thing to do. I wanted to get off on the right foot in my new town, guess that's not meant to be!

We get ice storms almost every single year. Wonder if they'll still claim ownership when that out of balance tree falls and hits my house.