The conversation over the fence
I did not go over there swinging. I want to be honest about the fact that I wanted to. There is a version of me, a younger version, who would have walked around the block and knocked on that door and said things that would have felt good for about four seconds and cost me for four years. I have learned the hard way that the man who loses his temper first is the man who loses.
So I went inside. I set the suitcase down. I drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink and I looked out the window at that shadow lying across my grass, and I let the first heat of it burn off before I did anything.
The next morning I walked around the block and knocked on the Carters’ door. Travis answered in a golf shirt with a coffee in his hand, and when he saw it was me he broke into that big salesman smile like I had come by to congratulate him.
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“There he is,” he said. “How’s it going, neighbor?”
I kept my voice level. “Travis, that new balcony on the back of your house. It’s hanging over my property. Several feet over. I need you to take a look at that.”
The smile did not leave his face, but something behind it shifted, and that shift told me everything. He was not surprised. He had known. He had known when he built it.
“Ah,” he said, waving the coffee cup. “Yeah, we bumped it out a little for the view. It’s fine. It’s just up in the air, it’s not like it’s on your ground. It’s not hurting anything.”
“It’s over my line,” I said. “That’s my airspace. That’s my yard it’s shading.”
He actually chuckled. “Come on, man. It’s a couple feet. Who’s it gonna bother? You worried about your grass getting too much sun?” He said it friendly, joking, but I heard the thing underneath it, which was that he did not think I would do anything. He had built a twelve-foot balcony out over another man’s land in seven days flat, banking on the one thing salesmen always bank on, which is that most people will not make a fuss. They will grumble and adjust and hang a curtain and let it go, because a fight is expensive and uncomfortable and slow, and the person who is willing to be uncomfortable the longest usually wins. He had looked at me, a quiet older guy who kept to himself, and he had decided I was a man who would let it go.