The six sycamores along the eastern edge of my property were gone.

Not damaged by lightning. Not dead from disease and finally fallen. Gone. Cut. Six stumps in a clean row where there had been six trees for as long as I could remember and longer. They were forty-year trees, the kind that had put on mass decade by decade until they had real presence, real weight. They leaned just slightly toward the sun the way old trees do, as if they’d been paying attention their whole lives. My father planted three of them when I was young enough that the saplings were taller than I was and I thought that was remarkable. The other three were there already when we arrived, predating us, already teenagers in tree years.

Together they’d grown into a single wall of green along the eastern edge of my yard, a canopy that gave me shade in August and privacy from the ridge above. From any window on the upper floor of the house I used to look east and see sycamore. Now I looked east and saw sky and the glass faces of the houses on Cedar Ridge Estates staring back down at me from the hilltop like they had always been waiting for the obstruction to be removed.

Mara was standing by the fence line with her arms folded, jaw set, not saying anything.

“I tried to stop them,” she said when I reached her.

“What do you mean you tried to stop them?”

She’d been home when the trucks pulled up around ten that morning. Two of them, a company logo on the doors, men in hard hats and orange shirts with chainsaws and a chipper. She walked over immediately and asked what was happening. One of them said they were just following the work order. She asked whose work order. He said Cedar Ridge Estates HOA.

I looked at her for a moment.

Cedar Ridge Estates sits on the ridge directly east of my property. It went up about five years ago, stone entrance sign with a little fountain that runs even when the county asks people to voluntarily cut water usage, big houses with bigger windows, the kind of development where the homeowners’ association sends formal correspondence about aesthetic standards. I am not in Cedar Ridge. My family’s land predates the development by three decades. We are not in their jurisdiction, not on their maps, not under any obligation to their standards, and not, as far as I had always understood, any of their concern.

There was a business card under my windshield wiper. Summit Tree and Land Management. I called the number standing in my own front yard.

A man answered on the second ring with the cheerful efficiency of someone booking appointments. I told him my name and told him what I was looking at and asked him to explain the work order. He shuffled some papers and told me the HOA president had signed off on lot boundary clearing along the south overlook, that the trees had been identified as encroaching on common property and obstructing the community view corridor.

View corridor.