I live in a row house, in a street of row houses, shoulder to shoulder. The little streets either side of me are full of more row houses, and both of the little streets are dead ends; they terminate in a railroad cut, where freight trains rumble past at night. 

It’s crowded here. Access is complicated. People manage, though. There’s an alleyway in back of my house, where a crew once took down a tree that was growing right in the center of the narrow sidewalk, and I don’t know how anyone got in there to take it down. It was snug. They managed it easily.

Apparently that kind of thing happens regularly. 

Saturday, for instance, a Philadelphia Housing Authority van pulled up onto the sidewalk at the corner of the dead end street, and then a big pickup truck pulling a massive woodchipper backed into the street past it.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority is who owns and supervises public housing in Philadelphia. It’s the biggest landlord in Pennsylvania, and there are some PHA houses in my neighborhood, even though some of the other houses go for a million dollars, because of gentrification. 

A man in overalls was leaning against a wall, and I asked him what was happening. “There’s a big a tree in one of our houses,” he said. “You can see it over the rooftops,” and he beckoned me to walk a few steps so I could see. 

We regarded the tree together. It was twice as tall as one of the two-story rowhouses, with enormous flat leaves, and was festooned with bunches of brown nuts. “It’s one of those paulownia trees,” I said eventually, and he agreed. 

I told him I had one of those trees in my back yard when I was a kid, and also that I got my neighbor’s permission to take one out of their back yard when it was starting to lift up the concrete. “You have to poison the stump, because they grow back. They’re hollow, and they grow fast, so they fall over easy,” I said to the gentleman in overalls.

He nodded. “It’s been growing maybe five years,” he said. 

Meanwhile, another massive truck had pulled up in the street in front of my house, also blocking off the dead end street. It was not a PHA truck. A small man put a lifting harness on himself and then unloaded a washer, which he wheeled down the street past the woodchipper, as if it was nothing unusual. He hit a crack in the sidewalk with his hand truck and had to back up and start again, but he got past.

Of course, while all of this was going on, the van, the truck with the chipper, and the delivery truck were periodically to-and-fro-ing to let cars through, because people live here and they have to be somewhere else. The overall guy asked me if I needed to move my car, and I told him I don’t have one. 

Another man came out of the alleyway, meanwhile, and said there was a barrier in the back yard he wanted to take down. so he could get at the tree. He asked the guy in the overalls, who shook his head. “I don’t have my truck,” said the overall guy. Apparently he meant some other truck, because the world was full of trucks right then. 

I went back into my house, and then I heard the woodchipper start up. Eventually, the appliance truck trundled away. 

I still don’t know how these guys do it. It’s like a Rubik’s cube somehow, or finicky origami. Something you do on a bench, with a bright light and a loupe, except immense, and with the roaring whine of a woodchipper.