The Wall My Neighbor Wanted Gone
The Pool Rita Wanted
I found out the rest of it from the pool company’s own sign, staked in Rita’s front yard a week later, advertising a free consultation for anyone else on the street who wanted the same thing. Sixteen by thirty two, saltwater, a stamped concrete patio wrapping the whole back corner where my wall currently stood.
Her plan, as best I could piece together, was simple and completely uninformed. Take the wall out, regrade that corner of the slope flatter, and build her pool and patio into the newly opened space, with a low decorative garden wall in its place for looks. In her head, my sixty feet of stacked stone was an old fashioned obstacle standing between her and a nicer backyard, not the only thing keeping that corner of the property from sliding downhill onto her own foundation the first time it rained hard for three days straight.
I tried one more time, over the phone, laying it out as plainly as I knew how. That wall was not just protecting my yard. It was protecting hers, and Norm’s memory of the place, and the two houses beyond hers that sat even further down the slope. Remove it, regrade without engineering it properly, and the first heavy spring would test every assumption her contractor had made.
“You’re a landscaper,” she said, not unkindly, but not kindly either. “I’m sure you know dirt. But I’ve got an actual design professional handling this, and he says it’s completely manageable with modern drainage.”
I asked her, one more time, whether that design professional had actually gotten a geotechnical engineer out to look at the slope itself, not just the patio he was pouring on top of it.
She did not answer that question either. She told me she had a contractor to call and hung up.
The Vote
The HOA met the second Tuesday of that month in the little meeting room behind the volunteer fire station, folding chairs and a coffee urn that had seen better decades, eleven of the twelve houses represented in one form or another. I brought photographs. I brought a rough sketch of the drainage. I brought twenty years of nobody ever complaining about that wall until four months ago.
Rita ran the meeting from the front table like she had been doing it her whole life. She reminded everyone, more than once, that the bylaw amendment had already passed, that the violation notice was procedurally sound, and that the board’s job now was simply to enforce what the community had already agreed to.