The Wall My Neighbor Wanted Gone

The Notice Taped To My Door

I found the envelope taped to my front door on a Thursday morning, right at eye level, where I could not possibly miss it. Cream colored paper, the HOA letterhead Rita had printed up herself, my name spelled correctly for once. I stood there in my work boots with my coffee going cold in my other hand and read it twice, because the first time through, my brain simply refused to accept it.

Catbird Ridge Homeowners Association, Notice of Violation. Unapproved and unsightly retaining structure, section fourteen, subsection two, materials and aesthetics. Thirty days to remove or bring into compliance, after which a fine of one hundred dollars per day would begin accruing against the property.

The structure in question was sixty feet of stacked limestone and reinforced block sitting at the back of my yard, ten feet tall at its highest point. I had built it. I knew exactly what it was for, because I had spent three months of my life on my knees in the mud making sure it would do that job for the rest of mine.

It was not decoration. It was the only thing standing between an entire hillside and the three houses sitting downhill of me, one of which now belonged to the woman who had just ordered me to tear it out.

I run a small grading and stone outfit outside Mountain Home, and if twenty two years in that business teaches you anything, it teaches you that hillsides do not forgive shortcuts. I folded the notice, put it in my truck, and drove to the site I was supposed to be grading that morning instead of standing in my own yard arguing with a piece of paper. But I thought about it the whole day. I thought about it that night, too, lying awake next to the side of the bed that had been empty for three years, doing the math on what a hundred dollars a day would do to a business that ran on thin margins already.

Thirty days. Three thousand dollars a month, and counting, for the crime of keeping a hill where a hill was supposed to be.