The Balcony Over My Backyard

I told myself windows are windows. You hang a curtain. You plant a hedge. You move on. I was not going to pick a fight with a man over where he put his own glass on his own house. That would make me the crank on the street, the guy who cannot let anybody live. I had spent my whole life being the opposite of that man. So I let it go.

By the end of that summer the house was basically done. White siding, black trim, the modern farmhouse look you see on every third new build now. Clean. Sharp. Expensive-looking. The second story had a set of big sliding doors that opened onto the back, up above the yard.

And that was all. Just doors. No deck. No balcony. Nothing reaching out past the wall of the house. I noted that. I remember noting it, the way you note a fence line or a property stake, filing it away without knowing why. Doors on the second floor, opening onto nothing but air. For now.

In October I had to leave for a week. Guard training down at a base in Missouri. Routine. The kind of thing I had done a hundred times, packing the same bag the same way, checking the same list.

I locked the house up, set the thermostat low, and walked across the street to ask Dave to keep half an eye on the place. Grab my mail. Make sure a pipe did not burst. He said sure, the way he always did, and told me to bring him back some of that good barbecue sauce they sell down there. I told him I would. I did, actually. That detail does not matter to the story, but I want you to know I am the kind of man who remembers the sauce.

I flew out Monday. The week was long and dusty and full of young soldiers who made me feel every one of my years, and by the end of it I wanted nothing on this earth except my own chair under my own tree. I flew back into Columbus that Sunday, drove home in the last of the afternoon light, and turned onto my street feeling that particular relief that only comes from a mailbox you recognize.

I did not go inside first. I never do after a trip. I rolled my suitcase around the side of the house, through the gate, and out into the backyard, because the backyard is the thing I come home to.

And I stopped.

The first thing I noticed was not the house. It was the shadow. A long, hard-edged rectangle lying across my lawn, right over the patch of grass where the afternoon sun always fell, where my chair always sat. A shadow that had not been there a week ago. A shadow with straight sides, the kind that only comes off of something built.

I looked up.

There it was. A balcony. A brand-new second-story balcony hanging off the back of the Carter house, off those sliding doors that a week ago had opened onto nothing. Wood decking, black metal railing, the whole thing maybe twelve feet wide. Somebody had framed it, decked it, railed it, and stained it, all in the seven days I was gone.

And it was not near the property line. I want to be precise, because precision turned out to be the whole ballgame. It was not close to the line. It was past it. The balcony reached out well beyond the Carters’ fence, out over the top of my fence, and hung there in the air several feet inside my yard. Directly above my grass. Directly above my chair. Directly above the one square of ground on this earth that I had bought and paid for and bled a little for the right to sit in quietly.

I stood there with the suitcase handle still in my hand and I said the only thing there was to say, out loud, to nobody.

“You have got to be kidding me.”