The Natural Order of Succession is Being Usurped

Mass beautification is afoot in Backroads. I am not sure what occasion these efforts mark. We don't have a festival coming up. I doubt it's to impress the press which will be convening at the prison. Apparently we are about to lethally inject another convicted ne'er-do-well, because the sawhorses and orange tape that mark the press area have been in place since yesterday.

The thoroughfares of Backroads have not had this much attention lavished upon them since that headless body was found in the septic tank, and (unrelatedly) the cardboard-boxed portable meth lab was abandoned along the gravel road.

On my way to town this morning, I encountered a truck with a man-basket parked on the blacktop county road, another truck with a woodchipper parked behind it. It looked like they had recently felled a tree, because four sections of trunk were laying in the underbrush across the road. I suppose they were too big or too heavy to chip.

In a nearby town, crews had a road blocked off between the mini post office and the old library/city hall, painting thick white stopping lines by the stop signs, and also rectangular parking spaces along the road.

On the road to my mom's house, MEN WORKING signs were in place for the gray-pantsed, white-t-shirted prisoners weedeating along the right of ways. Thank goodness we have three prisons in the area to meet our landscaping needs. They are not allowed mowers. I suppose they could make a low-speed getaway like a Humpty-Dumpty-with-a-melon-head kind of guy on a Rascal. The only time they get mowers is on the prison grounds proper, when they gang-mow in a  wedge like geese in migration. Yesterday, though, a regular civilian was mowing the grounds all by his lonesome. Again, probably due to the upcoming injection.

Because the chopper/chipper combo was blocking half the road, without even the courtesy of a flagman to watch for oncoming traffic, I chose an alternate route home. Wouldn't you know it, I got behind a yellow highway department tractor with a mower that extends off to the side on a stalk. You know. It mows those slanted ditch embankments, and sometimes tree branches.

I swear. The Backroads foliage is being trimmed closer than a pr0n performer's privates. Not that Val knows anything about such grooming techniques. She's an avid reader, you see, and keeps up with current pop culture.