Adam & Amber’s Blog

“There is a truck in our yard”, That is what Amber said when she called me at work this afternoon.

At first I thought she meant that someone had parked over the curb a bit and onto our lawn. Then she started talking about the recycling bin being crushed and I thought to myself, “Why would someone run-over our recycling bin?”. At this point she told me that the truck hit one of the trees in front of our house, I finally understood the scope of what she was talking about. Sometimes my slowness is astounding.

While Amber checked the car for passengers (there were none) and called the Police (because we figured that is what you do when someone parks their truck in your tree), I headed home from work to help her sort it out.

Driving home I had plenty of theories about why there was a truck in our yard. I figured that it couldn’t have been a sober adult because if you accidentally drove your truck into my tree you would either knock on the door ad fess up (which I would prefer), or you would immediately drive away (dragging away my recycling bin). I thought about an intoxicated adult, but then why would you run? And if you were drunk enough to park your truck in my tree, I would imagine you couldn’t run very far before ending up on your face. The most obvious choice to me was that a neighborhood kid, of which there are plenty, went on a joy ride that ended with an amateur parking job in my tree.

It just so happened that at almost the exact moment I arrived home, I also learned how wrong I my theories were. After meeting Amber in our front yard (that had a truck parked in it) and talking about a variety of topics mostly surrounding the fact that there was a truck parked in our tree. A neighbor from a few houses up the street comes running out her front door, very curious as to why the truck she parked on the street a few hours before was now parked in my tree. Apparently, she had borrowed the manual transmission truck and was given instructions not to set the parking break. An old transmission and gravity took care of the rest.

Luckily no one got hurt and the truck didn’t make it to the intersection at the end of our street. The tree held up like a champ with only minor bark damage and the remarkably springy recycling bin was, well, remarkably springy. So other then losing 15 minutes of work and wasting a few minutes of the Police’s time, no harm was done (Well except to the front of the truck, but come on everyone knows you set the parking break on manual transmission’s, especially on a hill).