My wife thought it was funny at first. We both did, because it kept happening, and at the beginning a thing that keeps happening still feels like a joke you have not understood yet. Our recycling bins were out half an hour too long, and we got a written notice in the mailbox. Our kid left a bike in the side yard overnight, and we got another one. We hung a little fabric thing on the front door, one of those seasonal ones with a flower on it, totally normal, and somehow that was a violation of the exterior-decor approval process. I did not even know there was an exterior-decor approval process. I am not really sure anyone did, except Doris, who seemed to have memorized the entire rule book and treated it like scripture.
The thing that really got under my skin was that she only did it to certain houses. She had her favorites and she had her targets, and somehow being the new family with kids put us firmly in the targets category. There was a couple two doors down who had a literal pile of construction debris in their side yard for months, and they never got a thing. Meanwhile I got a notice because my garbage-can lid was not fully closed on a windy day. I am not exaggerating. The notice used the phrase “failure to secure refuse container,” as if a gust had committed a misdemeanor.
We have three kids. They are young, school age, the kind of age where they have an enormous amount of energy, and the only acceptable way to get rid of it is to let them run around outside until they are tired enough to fall asleep. We bought a house with a backyard specifically so they would have a place to do that. That was the whole point. That was the dream we had been saving for. Doris hated that backyard like it had personally wronged her. Every time the kids were out there, she would materialize at the back fence. My youngest is loud. I will own that. He is a loud little kid. But he is a kid in his own yard in the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday.
The first time Doris complained about the noise, my wife went out and talked to her, all polite, and Doris told her that the neighborhood had a reasonable-enjoyment clause and that our kids playing was interfering with her reasonable enjoyment of her property. My wife pointed out that it was two in the afternoon. Doris said two in the afternoon was when she liked to sit on her patio. So we started keeping them inside more, and honestly I hated that. I genuinely hated that we had bought this house so they could play outside and now we were keeping them inside because some woman down the street could not stand the sound of children. But we did it because we were new and we did not want to be those neighbors, the ones everybody whispered about. We figured if we just kept our heads down and were polite, she would eventually find someone else to bother.