Mr. Chen from the corner house said he had served on a condo board in Chicago before retiring to Maple Grove. He said boards voted on contracts above a modest threshold, always, and the votes lived in minutes that members could inspect. His certainty moved through the small crowd like wind through the remaining maple.
That evening, after the neighbors had gone home to their own dinners and their own intact shade, Hannah and I walked the row together. She carried the notebook while I carried a tape measure borrowed from my father's old toolbox in the garage. The metal case still bore his initials, scratched there with a nail decades earlier.
US DRAMA
We measured each stump across its widest point and then again across its narrowest, and Hannah recorded both numbers beside my photographs. The first oak measured thirty-one inches, a trunk that had needed two of my father's arms to circle when I was a boy. I did not say that aloud, because saying it would have cost me my composure.
The second stump, a red maple, measured twenty-four inches and still wept sap that caught the low light like amber. The third, another oak, measured twenty-eight, and its heartwood showed a dark knot where a limb had healed over long ago. Each number went into the notebook in Hannah's steady handwriting, page after page.
We measured the distance from each stump to the fence, to the sidewalk, and to the corner of the house, pacing some and taping others. Ordinary mature trees leave ordinary measurements behind them, and I wanted every one preserved before rain could wash the sawdust flat. Hannah read numbers back to me for confirmation, the way pilots read instruments.
At the fourth stump I found a section of pink tape still nailed to the bark, fluttering slightly in the evening breeze off the street. I photographed it in place, then removed it with my pocketknife and sealed it in a sandwich bag. Hannah labeled the bag with the date and the stump number in permanent marker.
At the fifth stump, the youngest of the oaks at twenty-six inches, I counted rings until the light failed and my eyes blurred the lines together. I reached somewhere past forty-five before I stopped, and even that count was certainly short of the truth. Hannah put her hand on my back and said we could count again in the morning.
The sixth stump stood closest to the street, a red maple of twenty-two inches that had turned the deepest crimson every October of our marriage. Its leaves lay in the grass around us already wilting, red going brown at the edges within hours of separation. Hannah picked one up and pressed it flat inside the notebook without asking me.
We photographed the three standing trees last, from the street and from the house, so their survival would be as documented as the loss. The two oaks rose at the far end with their canopies untouched, and the maple between them held the last of the light. Standing beneath them felt like standing in the final room of a burned house.
Inside, Hannah made tea neither of us drank and laid the work order copy, the notebook, and the thumb drive in a row. The arrangement looked like a place setting for a meal nobody wanted to eat. She asked me what a records demand actually involved, and I told her we were about to learn together.
I had spent enough years around contracts at work to know the shape of a formal demand, if not every statute behind it. The association's own bylaws, which I kept in a kitchen drawer with appliance manuals, promised members inspection of books and records. I found the passage on the second try and read it aloud to the quiet kitchen.
The bylaws required a written request, stated a purpose, and allowed the association ten business days to produce the records for inspection. They also required minutes of board meetings to be kept and preserved by the secretary. I felt the ground of the evening shift slightly under my feet, becoming firmer.
I drafted the letter at the kitchen table while Hannah sorted photographs on my laptop into folders named by stump and by hour. I addressed it to the board of directors of the Maple Grove Homeowners Association, with copies noted for Ms. Ruiz. My hands had stopped shaking somewhere around the second page of measurements.
I demanded the signed original of the Whitfield Outdoor Services work order and every contract, bid, and invoice connected to the removal. I demanded the minutes of every meeting where tree removal on private lots had been discussed that year. I demanded the mailing log Karen had mentioned, and the notice she claimed had been sent to my address.
I demanded the emergency provision she had invoked, in the exact form it existed in the governing documents, with its adoption date. I demanded the association's insurance information and the management company's correspondence file for my property. Each demand got its own numbered paragraph, because numbered paragraphs are harder to lose than wishes.
I closed by stating that the removal had occurred on my land without my consent, that I disputed any authority claimed for it, and that all related records should be preserved. Hannah read the draft over my shoulder and changed only one word, replacing unfortunate with unauthorized. She was right, and the letter became colder and better for her edit.
I printed three copies on our small home printer, which jammed once, as it had jammed on every important document since we bought it. I signed each copy in blue ink and dated them, and Hannah photographed each signature page. We sealed one copy in an envelope for hand delivery and one for certified mail in the morning.
The third copy went into a new folder labeled with the date, the first folder of what would become a row of them. I placed the work order copy behind it in a plastic sleeve, and the thumb drive in a small envelope taped to the folder's inside cover. Hannah wrote the inventory on the folder's front in her teacher's hand.