This week my girlfriend and I went outside one morning and found that a healthy tree, whose lower limbs were blocking easy access to our trash bins, had been trimmed back. We could finally reach the trash bins without pushing up branches! What a lovely way to start our morning. I never questioned who did it. Was it the man who mows our lawn? Was it the neighbor whose car has to be parked under this tree? I did not care and did not investigate.
A Fort Worth neighborhood, by contrast, has taken to hunting the man trimming people’s front yard trees overnight. “I was talking to my wife, Emily and I was like, ‘Hey we had a storm last night’ and she was like ‘Oh no, that’s Edward Scissorhands’ and so I was like ‘uh what?’” resident Jerry Balkenbush told the CBS affiliate.
Apparently multiple home surveillance cameras caught a man they call Edward Scissorhands walking his dog at 3 a.m. and trimming trees, and people have filed police reports. “He starts trimming the tree and admiring his work and kind of stepping back,” another resident said. “We really just want him to stop doing this.”
I don’t. He’s trimming trees, not ripping out your Ring doorbell! Why are people being such babies about this? Let the man live.
“Sometimes he’ll just take a little bit, but then in other people’s trees he’ll take massive gobs,” resident Ashley Thomann told the news station. “We’re all liable for those trees per our HOA, so if something happens to the tree everybody is paying hundreds of dollars per tree to replace them. So that’s part of it and then I think the other part of it is it’s someone else’s property, but we also don’t want someone to get hurt either.”
That’s the real rub. The Homeowners Association is a little bitch. We should not be punishing Edward Scissorhands—we should be punishing and abolishing HOAs. HOAs can be traced back to the racist housing covenants that kept people of color out of certain neighborhoods.
In conclusion: Justice for Edward Scissorhands. The trees look nicer now. Everybody grow up.