It was 3am on the morning of Christmas Eve, when I woke up to the screech of a car speeding away. Normally I would have just gone back to sleep, but I had a weird, delirious feeling that it wasn’t the screeching that had actually waken me. I peeked out the window and saw no evidence of the crash my subconscious was swearing to me it heard. I called myself an idiot and got back into bed.

That morning at a normal hour, a housemate and I met my next-door neighbor out front to go to brunch. It was then that I realized that the screeching car jumped the curb near the corner, took out a street tree and a metal street sign, shedding pieces of itself as it went. It continued down the sidewalk, past my house — damaging nothing of mine — then curved back toward the street, running over my neighbor’s tree pit and nicking his tree, and then running over the final street tree on the block before presumably running the light and hurtling down Central.

A similar fate befell the tree in front of my house just days before we moved in. No wonder so many of the trees on this side of Bushwick are so small — they keep getting run over. Needless to say, the splintered trees and sign lay where they fell. I assume it will be years before someone decides to have new trees planted.