Dear Ginormous Oak Tree Towering in My Front Yard,

I don’t love you anymore.

If we’re being frank, and I don’t know why I wouldn’t because I’m talking to a tree, I’ve never really loved you.

Since the day that I bought this house, you’ve plagued my yard with unwanted acorns and leaves at seemingly all seasons of the year, and quite bluntly, the size to which you’ve grown I’m sad to say has become rather unsightly.

You’re not so much as a tree anymore as you are an abomination.

I mean, I’m sure you had good intentions when the original developer who built my house long before it became mine years earlier planted you in the ground along with dozens of your friends and family smack dab in the middle of every single lawn in our neighborhood … but something must’ve changed over the years because whereas my neighbors have these quaint, tasteful oak trees along their landscape, there you are growing in every direction without any rhyme or reason or care for aesthetics whatsoever…

It’s like you don’t even care about how you look in my front yard anymore. You’re there to add some color to an otherwise admittedly bland cookie-cutter, suburban landscape, but instead looking out my window is like hearing a toddler screaming, “TREE! TREE!! TREE!!!” without realizing just how absolutely obnoxious behavior like that is to the rest of us.

Over the years, I’ve tried to make it work.

I’ve spent far too many days out there in the sweltering Florida heat trying to trim your branches to keep our HOA from suing the both of us into kingdom come, but tree, there comes a time when a guy just gets tired of trying to fix you when you really make no concerted effort to better yourself.

I don’t think I’m asking for much – just don’t be repulsive and make me hate all oak trees whenever I pass by you in my front yard.

Don’t drop your leaves all over my lawn and make me waste good indoor hours sweating and raking, only to then do the exact same thing with acorns the following week, and then more leaves, and so on and so forth.

And for god’s sake, would it kill you to lay off the photosynthesis for a while?! You’re literally taller than my house – stop growing already!!!

It’s for these reasons, oak tree, that I’ve decided I simply cannot have you in my life anymore. I need foliage that’s more low maintenance … that cares about how it fits into the rest of my landscape. And fine, I’ll just say it – palm trees are much sexier than oak trees.

So let’s not make this any harder than it has to be. When the brutish guys come who are much more manly than me to dismantle you limb by limb and rip you out of my lawn by your roots, please don’t make a scene. When they use their noisy, frightening chainsaws to chop your body into manageable pieces and pile your dismembered corpse onto their trailer, I ask that you just go quietly like a respectable tree would go.

When you get back to their lot and they slowly feed you to their wood chipper to turn your body into mulch that they’ll sell for $25 a yard … ok, at that point I don’t really care how much you scream and cry as you go because you’ll be miles away and I won’t have to deal with you anymore!

My lawn is going to be so much better without you.

I’ve already had my eye on a couple of different options for palm trees to replace you with, and just the thought of not having to worry that your roots might wreck havoc on my driveway or sidewalk makes me sleep so much better at night, tree.

At the end of the day, this is really better for both of us. Me, without a hideous, horrible behemoth of a tree to curse at every day in my front yard, and you in turn get to live on as mulch in somebody else’s garden who might actually care about you … at least as much as anyone can really care about mulch, anyways.

I’d say thanks for the good times, but as far as I cam remember, there haven’t been any, so instead I simply say to you, oak tree – good riddance, and if you leave one single acorn behind that tries to grow into a baby oak tree in your wake, you’ll think I was kind by sending you to the wood chipper in comparison!

All my best,

Scott “Oak Trees are Awful” Sevener