The Feral Child and the HOA

When the box is too small for the immensity of me.

Photo by Mihai Moisa on Unsplash

Frank and I very rarely have company. We’re 15+ miles from any town, and we’re not “on the way” to anywhere. Our most common visitors include the meter reader and the phone repair man (we’re on Frontier, so we see him with some regularity). Not even Fed Ex or UPS venture up our driveway, honoring our request they just leave our packages on Frank’s mom’s porch.

Our house sits between a lake and a hayfield. Here in the country, it takes a significant amount of energy and time to keep anything manicured. Every spring I put on Frank’s beekeeping suit to pull poison ivy, and invasive species like Autumn Olive and stilt grass just get angry and flourish more when you whack them back. Chickens will scratch up any garden without a significant barricade boundary, and we dare not spray any kind of herbicide or pesticide that may threaten our cat, dogs, chickens, bees, etc.

I can visit the garden in my underwear if I wish, and the more I age, the less likely I am to walk back to the house just to pee on a porcelain throne. (I keep toilet paper in my garden apron.) And as mentioned in my recent post about my piddling approach to home project management, the yard includes the supplies, materials, and tools for all the things happening all at once.

Mother, on the other hand, lives in the city, in a condo, in a senior living community, with a Home Owners’ Association. They have rules.

For example, Mother loves the lilies I grow to draw in and feed the hummingbirds, and lilac bushes that bloom in the spring. I had to divide mine and took transplants to add to her flower beds. I never imagined that they might not be on the “approved landscaping plants list.” In fact, it never occurred to me that such a list even existed.

I also had a tendency to park just over the edge of the concrete pad provided for guest parking in front of her condo. Imagine being a middle-aged woman, answering the door, only to be chastised by the HOA vice president because my tires were on the grass. It eventually became such an issue that when Mother presented a request to have her concrete pad expanded at her own expense, it was instantly granted.

(When I brought Mother home from the hospital after her back surgery, I drove right through the front yard to get the car as close as I could to the front door. No one dared to complain that day.)

Mother’s and Dan’s condo, before Mother added the concrete pad to extend the parking space. Note my tires are NOT on the grass in this picture.

Having grown up in suburbia, I understand the reasons for HOA rules, and Mother’s HOA, I understand, is worse than most. They change the rules as they wish to suit themselves, so the longer she lives there, the less I care about their rules, and the less the HOA cares to deal with me. I make sure to wave at all residents as they pass by, most of whom really don’t mind my visits — all but the president, the neighborhood bully, who lives two doors down.

My trips to Mother’s now require me to take furry children, our beagle puppy at first, and now the blind chihuahua mix we adopted. Mattie, the beagle, isn’t allowed back until she has matured a great bit more. Sun, the adoptee, doesn’t understand the concept of a leash.

Mother’s condo is a duplex, and luckily, all those who have lived next door have been wonderful people. Dan, who moved in two years ago, is in a wheelchair after a stroke six year’s past. I shovel his driveway when I shovel Mother’s, (The HOA won’t unless it snows more than an inch.) And on the days his aide doesn’t come, I bring in his mail when I gather Mother’s.

And, in order to draw the least amount of attention from the watchful HOA eyes, I come and go from Dan’s via the backyard doors, and never around the front. Dan loves my dogs, and doesn’t mind if they use his backyard as a toilet. The dogs are actually more welcome at Dan’s condo than they are at Mother’s. So there’s Mother’s backyard, Dan’s backyard, and then the backyard of the neighborhood bully, who keeps his yard more manicured and maintained than any other on the entire street. And I have a small blind dog with a beagle’s nose that I can’t put on a leash.

Dan’s back patio; Mother’s is on the other side of the storage closet.

I have greater worries about Sun wandering into the bully’s yard than in the busy street on the other side. He’ll stop at the sidewalk between the yard and the road on that side, but there’s no such boundary between Dan’s and the bully’s. Blind dogs rely on verbal cues, so more than once I had to run and gather him up, with the command to “stop” so I could catch up with him, “up” to prepare him for me grabbing him, and then reminding him, “you have to stay out of the bad man’s yard.”

And every time it happened, the infraction was followed by the bad man coming out to water the plants on his patio expansion, approved by the HOA, under his leadership. I live in a world with chicken, goose, cat, rabbit, deer, and dog crap everywhere, and now my biggest fear was that my blind dog would shit in this man’s picture-perfect yard. (And why, suddenly, do I have the urge to take a dump in his yard myself?)

This is a critical development in the power struggle we’ve had with the HOA since the beginning. The backyard patios (divided by a storage closet extension), and their shared backyard has been my domain since Mother became the first resident on the street. This is where Mother allows visitors to smoke, where she grows tomatoes and peppers in pots, where we can sit outside without having to watch neighbors watching us watching them. For more than a decade, that space on the corner lot was mostly private, until he extended his patio out into the common grounds area.

Dan’s patio; a different perspective. Note the seating in the upper right of the photo, where the neighbor has extended his patio past the back of his condo and past the photo’s edge.

Perhaps, for the first time, Mr. Man realized how much traffic passed between Mother’s and Dan’s via the backyard access. That his private extension wasn’t going to be as private as he’d hoped, and that he was actually infringing on the privacy that previously existed. Perhaps he just realized there was an entire existence in the backyards that he had not been monitoring.

By now though, he knows — I’m more likely to bite him than either of my dogs. And I shoot him a defiant look that I feel tells him I will bag any wayward poop, but I will also defend my territory. In truth, he likely interpreted the look as a dare to pick this battle. We may follow the rules out front, but you’re in the backyard now buddy.

Oh, the insanity of an HOA gone wrong.

This summer, I’m urging Dan to set up small ramps to get his wheelchair over the threshold of the sliding glass door onto his back patio. Then we can sit outside and watch the blind dog run without a leash, admire unapproved plants, and be boisterous in the sun. We can laugh loud, let people smoke, listen to music, and get quiet and watch when the bully comes out to water those approved petunias.

He’ll have approval for a privacy panel on our side of his patio in no time.