The Wall My Neighbor Wanted Gone
Madam President
By June, Rita was HOA president. The vote happened at a meeting I missed because I was pouring a foundation two counties over, and by the time I heard about it, she had already started drafting amendments to bylaws that had not been touched since the Clinton administration.
The one that mattered to me landed in section fourteen. Materials and aesthetics. Retaining structures built from timber, salvaged stone, or “non uniform masonry” would no longer meet community standards and would need to be brought into compliance with approved materials within a set window, or face daily fines.
I did not think much of it when I first heard about it secondhand at the feed store. My wall was stacked limestone with a reinforced core, not some pile of old railroad ties, and I figured any reasonable reading of “non uniform masonry” would leave it alone. I underestimated exactly how far Rita was willing to stretch a definition to get what she wanted.
What I did not know yet, because she had not told a soul on that board, was that she already had a pool contractor out to her own backyard measuring the exact stretch of ground my wall was holding up.
A Hundred Dollars A Day
The notice came two weeks after that measuring visit, taped to my door on a Thursday, thirty days and a hundred dollars a day hanging over my head like a second mortgage nobody had asked me to sign.
I drove straight to Rita’s house instead of stewing on it. She met me on her new back porch, the one looking out over my wall, holding a mug that said Blessed in gold script.
“Rita, I got your notice,” I said. “I think there’s been some confusion about what that wall actually does.”
“There’s no confusion,” she said. “It’s an eyesore, and per the new bylaws, it doesn’t meet material standards.”
“It’s load bearing,” I told her. “It’s the only thing keeping this whole hillside off your house. Off Norm’s old house, I mean. Off yours now.”
She waved that away like I was quoting a superstition instead of physics. “I’ve had a landscape architect out here. He says a modern retaining system would look a hundred times better and take up half the footprint. Frankly, Gina, I think you’ve just gotten used to something being there so long you can’t imagine the yard without it.”
I asked her, straight out, if this had anything to do with the pool plans I had heard she was drawing up for that corner of her yard. She did not answer that directly. She told me the board had already discussed it and voted, three to one, with her own vote as president breaking what would otherwise have been a tie.
I left without raising my voice, because that has never once won me anything with somebody who has already made up her mind. But I noticed something on my way out I could not stop thinking about. A fresh concrete slab, poured close to the toe of the slope, with a hose running off it toward a drain that emptied straight downhill, right toward the base of my wall.