We had been homeowners for four days when the woman four houses down decided our garage was a crime scene. The first house we had ever owned sat in a normal suburban HOA neighborhood, the kind where the houses are close together, the lots are small, and everything looks almost the same if you squint. We had rented for years before that, little apartments where you could hear the guy upstairs sneeze. When we finally closed, with an actual house and an actual backyard, we felt like we had won the lottery. We knew it was an HOA going in. We were members. We paid the same dues as everybody else. We read the rules, and none of it seemed too crazy. What nobody tells you when you buy into one of these places is that the rules on paper are not really the problem. The problem is whatever person on the board has decided the rules are a personality.
For us, that person was our treasurer. I will call her Doris. That is not her real name. Doris was maybe in her late fifties, lived four houses down and across, and she had this way of appearing. You would be doing something completely normal in your own yard, and you would get a feeling on the back of your neck, and you would turn around, and there she would be, standing at the edge of your property with her phone out, just watching you. Not waving. Not saying hi. Just watching and typing.
The first week we lived there, I was in the garage unpacking boxes with the door open, and Doris walked up the driveway. She did not introduce herself. She did not say welcome to the neighborhood. The first words out of her mouth were about the boxes. She wanted to know how long the empty boxes were going to be sitting in my garage, because we have standards about visible clutter from the street. I had been a homeowner for roughly four days. I laughed, because I thought she was joking. She was not. She stood there until I told her I would break them down that night, and then she made a note on her phone and left.