Loud-colored vests and monster machines...my street is no longer my own

For the last month or two our city's construction fleet has slowly crawled down our street from about two blocks away to its current working position just to the right of our front door. This pack of filthy, noise-polluting varmints, in their gaily-colored construction vests, has maintained its habit of shuffling about tearing up pavement and felling beautiful, much-needed shade trees. They seem to have no concern for the environment they've been paid to "reformat" and that has greatly troubled me.

My real concern started naturally with a worry for future parking difficulties; a concern that is incredibly valid when one lives in a neighborhood where street parking is the only parking. As time went by though my concern altered its focus to the look and feel of our street. I'd grown used to large, overhanging shade trees with concentric circles of flowers around their bases, the uneven brick of the road that seems so unusual compared to the rest of the city that it really became a treat to behold, and all the green grass that grew up out of the failing of Winter and the triumphant rise of Spring. All that now has been replaced by massive, cacophonous, yellow machines acting as glorified shovels, mounds of sandy dirt, and the previously mentioned chorus of button pushers and shovel wielders.

If the quality of the area surrounding my abode wasn't enough of a concern, my wife and I have found that as these dirt-moving, machine pilots go about the business of defacing our local nature they are also troubling the water pipes that give us our much needed drinking and bathing water. It's quite a shock to wake up in the morning to prepare coffee and find that either the pressure of the water escaping the faucet has been drastically reduced or that the water flows just fine but has now taken on an ochre or dark brown shade. Cleaning sand out of one's sink basin or bathtub after making this discovery is enough to drive me down the stairs and out the door to fly, fist-first, into the face of the nearest neon-vested loon.

Frustrations aside, I count the days till harsher weather arrives and the diesel dig buckets are stored away. It's a shame that I must neglect the beauty of a season where comfortable clothes are acceptable and instead check off the calendar hoping for three to four feet of the white stuff. Sadly they continue to crawl closer and there are so many days left till winter. I wonder how eco-terrorists sabotage bulldozers?

Till next time, dear reader(s).