The Balcony Over My Backyard

He was almost right.

“I’d like you to move it,” I said. “That’s all. Bring it back to your side of the line.”

Lindsay had come up behind him by then, and she folded her arms. “We already had it built,” she said. “Do you know what that costs? You want us to tear down a finished balcony over a few feet of air nobody was using anyway?”

Nobody was using. I stood on their porch and I thought about the five years I had spent using exactly that piece of air, sitting under it, being made whole under it, and I understood that to these people my quiet was nothing. It was empty space. It was unused inventory, and Travis Carter never met an unused inventory he did not want to annex.

“I’m asking nice,” I said. “One time. Move the balcony.”

Travis spread his hands, all reasonable, all reluctant. “Tell you what. Let’s not make this a thing. We’re all gonna be neighbors a long time.” And he started to close the door, gently, the way you close a door on a solicitor you feel a little bad for.

I put my hand flat on it. Not hard. Just enough to stop it.

“You’re right,” I said. “We are going to be neighbors a long time. So let’s do this right the first time.”

Then I took my hand off the door and let him close it, and I walked home and started doing this right.

Doing it right

Here is a thing I have learned. When you are angry, the temptation is to act big. Yell, threaten, get loud, make a scene. But the man who acts big is showing you he has nothing else. The man who has something real does the small, boring, patient things, one after another, and lets them add up into something a loud man cannot beat.

So I got boring.

The first thing I did was find my paperwork. When you buy a house you get a survey, and I am the kind of man who keeps his paperwork, so I had it, a little folded sheet in a folder in the filing cabinet in the basement. But a survey from 2018 was not going to be enough. I needed the line marked now, on the ground, by somebody with a stamp and a license, somebody a court would listen to.

I called a licensed surveyor. A real one, a firm that had been in the county for thirty years. It cost me around six hundred dollars and it was the best six hundred dollars I have ever spent. Two young men came out with a tripod and a rod and a little computer, and they spent an afternoon shooting points and driving stakes with pink ribbon on them, and when they were done they handed me a stamped drawing that showed, to the inch, exactly where my property ended and the Carters’ began.