And then I looked up, and Doris was in my backyard. Not at the fence. Not on the sidewalk. She was in my backyard. She had come through the side gate, the one we kept latched but not locked, walked across my grass, and she was standing in the middle of my Easter-egg hunt with her phone up, filming my children. My kids had stopped running. They were standing there, the three of them, frozen, looking up at this strange, angry adult who had appeared in their yard. Even through the glass, I could see the youngest one’s face starting to crumple, because he was scared.
I do not think I have ever moved that fast in my life. I dropped a knife. My wife dropped a spoon. We both came through the back door at the same time. By the time we got out there, Doris was already mid-rant, telling my eight-year-old that he needed to lower his voice and that this kind of disturbance was not acceptable in this community, while she was standing on my property, the property she did not own, that she had walked onto without permission, filming my children. I got between her and the kids and told my wife to take them inside, which she did, scooping up the youngest, who was crying now, and herding the other two through the door. Then it was just me and Doris, standing in my backyard, surrounded by hidden eggs.
“You need to get off my property,” I told her. I was trying really hard to keep my voice level, because the kids could still hear through the door, and I did not want to be screaming. “You walked into my yard. You don’t get to do that.” She did not even flinch. She kept the phone up, now pointed at me, and she said, “I’m documenting an ongoing noise violation. Your kids have been disturbing the peace of this entire street for the better part of an hour.” “It is Easter,” I said. “They are hunting eggs in our backyard, behind a fence. Get out of here.”
Here is the line I will remember for the rest of my life. She lowered the phone just enough to look at me directly and she said, “I’m the treasurer of this HOA. I have every right to be here.” I almost laughed. I really almost did, because that is such an insane thing to say. Being the treasurer of an HOA does not make you a cop. It does not even make you a code officer. It does not give you the right to walk through someone’s gate and onto their grass and film their kids. It means you handle the money for the people who pay for landscaping. That is it. That is the whole job. But in her head, over all these months of nobody ever telling her no, she had convinced herself that she was law enforcement, that the rule book was a badge, that she could go anywhere and do anything because she was on the board.