Last Saturday, our condominium board member greeted me at the parking lot with the words: Hettie, I didn’t forget about your tree! I was puzzled. There was a story with that tree; as you can see in the picture, it hangs over my backyard from the different condominium! It took several months of negotiations to agree to cut just one big branch. The tree was not a hazard, and “too much shade” on my loan was not good enough.
Indeed, the grass started to grow much better after that big brunch was removed. But there was still too much shade.
Now, the board member happily announced that she saw that the tree’s trunk is coming lower, and now it’s finally a hazard for my roof, and it has to go down. And now that somebody needs to pay for this tree to go down, it turned out that other condominiums might not even own the tree.
Since our fire lane is a part of the former local railroad (and I knew that!), there are high chances that the village owns it and will have to pay for its removal. I hope that they will be able to sort it out before the tree would come down by the forces of nature!
My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996.
I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future.
I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life.
As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.
View all posts by Hettie D.
Hettie's Reflections 
One thought on “The Tree”