Damn you, Silver Maples

To the City of Hopkins
1010 1st St S
Hopkins, MN 55343

Dear City of Hopkins,
This is to inform you that, once again this year silver maple trees all over the neighborhood are refusing to comply with your leaf pick-up ordinance and schedules. Once again this year, they are holding onto their leaves and stubbornly refusing to let go until after your leaf pick-up crews and trucks have passed through.

I suspect a plot. I suspect, too, that the plot is spreading. Keep your eye on the willows. They’re hanging back and exhibiting signs of reluctance. And the elms. And the oaks. Even the oldest and stateliest – towering trees that have been solid citizens of Hopkins for eighty years or more look as if, for whatever reason, they may choose to become “fellow travelers” this year.

The irony, of course, is that lowlife, riff-raff trees like the cottonwoods and box elders hanging out in the alleys, buckling garage foundations have already done their part to comply with the ordinance. Their leaves are falling.

And the decorative landscape trees – the crabapples and river birch clumps and the rocky mountain ash look like they’ll drop their leaves in time for homeowners to rake them up, tarp them to the street and meet your schedule too.

It’s the damned silver maples. They’re the heart of the problem. Standing there, with their roots in the sewer lines, and their leaves still green and firmly attached overhead, all smug and scoffing at a City of Hopkins ordinance.

It might be different if their leaves turned some dazzling color when they finally decided to go – a bright red, say – or a blazing orange that extended the more beautiful aspects of fall into November. If silver maples did that, maybe we could forgive them for copping this attitude.

But they don’t. Malevolent spirits that they are, they turn their leaves an anemic yellow-green. And they wait until they hear your trucks and street sweepers leave, then they drop them.

Standing in the living room, looking out the picture window, you can almost hear a sarcastic, “Ooops” as they let their leaves go.

Ten minutes later, it begins to snow. Five months after that, the last snows melt, and there are the silver maple leaves, still yellow green, only moldy now, limp as three week old lettuce in the refrigerator drawer and ready to blotch out the entire lawn until June.

Obviously, something has to be done, City of Hopkins. I say update the ordinance, or oil up the chain saws. It’s time to drum some respect into those no-good silver maples. Time to take a stand and show them who’s in charge.

The time is now. If we don’t draw a line in the lawn, here and now, then pretty soon Hopkins will be just like Saint Louis Park.

Signed,

An irate citizen