The Stubby Forest of Chesterfield County

 

Belinda had always been an odd child, so it came as no surprise that as an adult her thought process flowed upstream.  She never quite got the obvious and she became quite skilled at making wrong decisions, yet it never really phased her.

What saved her through the years was that her lawyer had gotten her an amazing settlement in her divorce.  Money for her was never an issue and so she spent it as if it would never run out.

When we met her she was having a house built next to the woods, and we don’t know why, but she also bought the woods.  There were seven acres that the building contractor left untouched and that is where she would let her four dogs run free.  Consequently, each evening she spent picking burrs from her dogs hair.  They were forever a tangled mess.

Then one day a salesman came to her door.  He was young, well dressed and a smooth talker.  By the time he drove away from her house, she had purchased 17 solar panels for her roof, and told that unless she had the tops of all the trees cut off, the sun would never reach the solar panels. The following morning she was on the phone making arrangements to have all the trees shortened.

Just as most medicines have side effects, so do the actions we take in life.  As promised, the solar company installed 17 large solar panels on Belinda's roof, and she had every tree in the forest shortened to no more than 5 feet tall, which kept the shade away from her house.

It was three short months from that point in time that the for-sale sign went up in front of her house.  Nothing she tried worked.  The sun beat down on her house relentlessly.  Worse than an oven, Belinda's air conditioning unit couldn’t keep up.  She was being baked alive inside her own house.

We don’t believe she ever caught on that the shade of the trees is what kept her house at the perfect temperature.  She has long ago moved away, even though her house never sold and still sits there empty.  Should you ever visit Chesterfield County, you’ll see it next to an odd-looking forest of tree stumps and branches.  Just don’t walk through it, it’s full of burrs.