I learned that with the judge’s instructions, the world changed quite a bit and our job became clearer and easier. Not necessarily easy but for our job, it was not anywhere nearly as muddled as I had thought it would be as I listened to the testimony and wondered where we were headed.

Imagine hearing 80 hours of talk about how some trees were problematically planted along city streets, how some didn’t live, how some were not planted, were stolen, were confused with other trees, how bushes were planted by mistake on one occasion with – no, without – no, make that with malice, and then you are asked, “Do the trunks of city-planted trees grow up or down?” And you get definitions for “up” and “down” and “tree” and "trunk" to work with too.