coconuts in the canal

A couple weekends ago Steven and I were in our backyard cleaning up. Unless you live in a condo, yards in Florida require almost constant maintenance. One of the things that is a pain in the ass about our yard are the coconut palm trees. Yeah, they look good, but a few times a year they grow giant coconuts that need to be removed or they will fall and wreck everything in their path.

The most efficient way to remove the coconuts is to saw down the stalk that the coconuts cling to. Steven is a master with the tree saw, so he usually heads up this project. On this particular day we had quite a few coconuts that were sawed down. About 100 I'd guess. We bagged them up as well as some random debris that we had collected during our cleanup. There were a few coconut stragglers that I kicked into the canal behind our house. I didn't think much about it until a little while later our next door neighbor* came over and told us that we were in the "dog house" because her neighbor across the canal had called her to complain that we were throwing things into the canal and that was illegal.

I was horrified that the neighbor called her and didn't just yell over to us from their yard. Our canal isn't so big that we wouldn't have heard them. I mean, come on. Aren't we all adults here? Just yell over to us that we shouldn't be throwing things into the canal. Honestly it never occurred to me that a few coconuts in the water would hurt anybody. It's not like I was pouring oil into the water. When my neighbor told me this I responded in the best way that a 5-year old could. I told her to tell the neighbor that we see them wasting water by washing their concrete many times a week and that during these times of drought and water restrictions we can't have them doing things like that. WTF? Could I be any more childish?

I haven't thrown any coconuts into the water since. And I also refuse to look at the neighbors that complained about us. It’s not such a bad thing, though. They have a tendency to walk around in their Speedos and they are in no shape to be doing that (either are we, but I digress).

* Our neighbor is an 80-year old German woman. The people who owned our house before us loathed her and the feeling was mutual. We have been lucky with her, but still tread lightly. We often find branches and the like in our backyard, which have been obviously thrown over our fence by her. But it could be much worse...