Keith and I love to watch crime on tv. Law & Order: Criminal Intent is our favorite, but CSI and others make plenty of appearances. They’re such satisfying shows - yes, it’s a formula, yes, the good guys usually win - but sometimes that’s just what you want. A puzzle with a clever solution and a sense of justice. And Vince D’Onofrio. He’s dreamy. Ok, maybe not dreamy in the classic sense, but I dig him.

So a little crime occured in our neck of the woods last night. Our mailbox, and as we later discovered, a little plum tree, were decimated last night. Ooh, ooh - our chance to play CSI!

The witness (ie. me) account goes something like this: At 2:00am, I woke to a flash of light and a big cracking sound. I thought it was thunder/lightning. But then there was a whining motor noise, like a motor under strain. And then a long squeal of tires as a vehicle raced away. I got up at that point, thinking there had been an accident in the road. Nope, nothing there, but I could see that the mailbox was gone. I went back to bed, pissed at some unknown and unseen group of rowdy, violent, bored kids.

But this morning I went out and looked at the ‘crime scene.’ I would expect the mailboxes to lie east of where they should be if someone with a bat sitting on the passenger side of a vehicle travelling east (ie. our side of the street) whacked them. But they weren’t - they were west of their original place. And the bushes to the west of them were damaged too. Somebody travelling west - not east - veered across the oncoming traffic lane and actually ran over our mailbox.

Now, I thought they had stopped short of the little tree there and just damaged the bushes. There were deep tire tracks right there going off again in a westerly direction. But Keith looked more closely at the tree than I did and noticed that the bark was scraped off on the trunk. He figured they hit the tree and then backed up. Good work, partner!

But when we looked at the scene from the upstairs window, it was clear that the tracks went beyond the tree entirely. They didn’t hit it - they ran it over and kept going! And sure enough, looking at the other side of the tree trunk, the bark was scraped from that side, too. Not only did they run over it, they backed up over it, too. Who knows if they were drunk or asleep or avoiding an animal - but they must have been going pretty fast to get past the two mailbox posts and a tree and keep going so far.

At this point, I’m kind of glad the mailbox was there. If it hadn’t slowed them down, they might have crashed right into our bedroom or the house next door. And if anyone out there knows how we might apply some first aid to the little tree (wrapping the bark or something like that?) to help it survive, that info would be very helpful.