The Tea Bags On My Balcony

By the weekend there were four of them. Trish from 4A, who finally came down and knocked on my door at ten at night in a bathrobe, whispering as if the walls were thin, and told me that Craig left his trash bags outside his door for two and three days at a time and then wrote her up for the smell when she complained, in a letter to Duane that said the odor came from her unit. Edith, on the ground floor, who is eighty-four years old and keeps a bird feeder on her patio and took down her wind chimes in August after an anonymous note said they were a nuisance. Edith did not know who had sent the note. She had assumed, she told me in her little kitchen over a cup of weak tea, that it had been somebody from the street.

“Tea,” I said, and took a sip, and nearly laughed, and then did not.

It was then that I understood that this was not about tea bags and never had been. The tea bags were only the part that came down from the sky where I could see it. Everything else Craig did, he did in typed paragraphs and polite phone calls, where nobody could point and say it was him.

On the tenth day, a notice went up on the corkboard in the lobby. It was typed, double-spaced, and signed by the vice chair. Item four on the agenda read: Proposed Balcony Standards Policy, to address organic debris, unsightly items, and nuisance fixtures on exterior balconies, with a fine of seventy-five dollars per incident.

Organic debris.

I read it standing in the lobby with my keys in my hand. Underneath the typed list, in a smaller font, were examples. Bird feeders. Wind chimes. Plant stands hung over the rail. Grills left uncovered. Seed hulls and food waste.

Every one of the examples was a thing owned by a person who had come to my door that week.

I stood there a long time. A man walked past me checking his mail and said good evening, and I said it back. Then I took a pen out of my purse, and on the sign-in sheet that hangs beside the corkboard, where residents put their names if they want to speak at the meeting, I wrote: Lois Ingram, 3B. Public comment. Item four.