The House I Bought Back

Eighteen Months Of Fifty Dollars

The first letter came eleven days later.

I have it. It is in a folder on the desk behind me as I write this. It is one page, it has the association’s letterhead at the top, and it cites an unapproved exterior structural modification. It gave them thirty days to remove the ramp and restore the steps to the original approved condition, and it assessed a fine of fifty dollars per week until they did.

Judy wrote back. She explained the diagnosis. She offered to submit whatever paperwork was needed. She offered to paint the ramp any color the committee wanted. She offered to take it down within thirty days of her husband’s death, and I want you to sit with the fact that a woman had to write that sentence in a letter to her neighbors.

The committee met and denied the variance. The minutes say the ramp was not in keeping with the character of the neighborhood.

Bev Rowan signed the letter.

The fifty dollars a week kept running.

Then it was the color of the ramp, because Doug had used a sealer and not a paint. Fifty dollars a week for that too, running at the same time.

Then it was the shutters, which had been that color since 1998.

Doug died in February of 2020. He was fifty three.

Judy took the ramp down herself in March, alone, with a circular saw she did not know how to use, and I did not know she was doing it because she did not tell me. She told me about it eight months later in a way that made it sound like nothing.

The fines did not stop when the ramp came down. There was a balance by then, and the balance had late fees on it, and the late fees had interest.

Then it was the grass, in the summer of 2020, when Judy was working doubles at the county clerk’s office because she had just lost half her household income and all of her husband.

Fifty dollars a week. Then another fifty. Then the letter from the association’s attorney, and that was seven hundred and fifty dollars all by itself.

Eighteen months.

By the time there was a lien on that house, the number was a little over eleven thousand dollars, and about four thousand of it was the actual fines. The rest was fees on the fees.

In October of 2021, Kyle Tate walked up that concrete walk with a writ of possession.

Judy signed the house over rather than go through the foreclosure, took what she could get out of the equity, and moved into a one bedroom apartment on the east side of Maryville with a parking lot view.

She died there fourteen months later. Her heart. She was fifty six years old, and she had lived on Hollow Creek Court for twenty four years, and nobody from that street came to the funeral.