Diane Whitaker had been the HOA president for six years. Late fifties, composed in the specific way of someone who has confused the calm of authority with the authority itself, pearl white Range Rover, the kind of smile that suggests she is doing you a favor by speaking to you. Her favorite phrase was community harmony. She used it the way certain people use the word unfortunately, as a cushion placed under something hard before it lands on you. I had received three violation notices in the two years since the annexation. Trailer visibility from the road. Trailer dimensions exceeding temporary structure guidelines. And now, on the coldest morning of the year, trailer presence constituting disruption to the seasonal uniformity of the neighborhood.
By nine in the morning, two of them had burst. I was at the hardware store by ten, hauling space heaters back to the trailer, trying to keep the interior temperature above the point at which the remaining lines would go. The burst pipes cost me twenty-four hundred dollars in damage before noon, and I spent that afternoon with my boots wet and my hands numb, running heat to a space that should have had electricity if the woman who answered the phone on the second ring and called me Cole in the tone of someone explaining a parking ticket had not decided that my trailer disrupted the neighborhood’s aesthetic relationship with winter.
I called the number. Diane told me the community had received multiple complaints. She told me the trailer disrupted the seasonal uniformity of the neighborhood. She said it with the mild regret of a person delivering inconvenient but necessary information, and I understood that she had rehearsed the conversation before I called and was moving through her prepared version of it. I told her that my pipes had burst. She expressed that she was sorry to hear that and suggested I contact a plumber. We were not, it was clear, having the same conversation.
Two days later, working in my shop on a night when I had nothing better to do than be angry in a productive direction, I went through a box of old property documents I had moved three times without opening. They had belonged to my grandfather and then to my father and they smelled of the particular combination of dust and age that belongs to paper that has been sitting in the same place for decades. Most of it was routine: deed transfers, tax records, survey maps. Then I found a yellowed folder at the bottom, labeled in my grandfather’s handwriting: utility easement, 1962.
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