Things escalated two weeks before the convertible fiasco. Brenda sent out a community-wide email announcing a mandatory Saturday seminar on proper hedge-trimming techniques. The message was typed entirely in caps, sprinkled with multiple red exclamation marks, and promised violation notices for anyone who did not attend. I replied politely that I had a prior commitment, which was actually just my plan to sleep past eight in the morning for once. I work late when a release is ugly. Saturday was the one morning the house was allowed to be quiet. Brenda was not amused by prior commitments. She did not believe in them unless she had issued them.
She showed up at my door at six-thirty that Saturday morning with a portable speaker blasting the Cedar Ridge Estates official anthem, which apparently existed. I had never heard it. No one I knew had heard it. It had a trumpet line and a lyric about standards that rhymed, badly, with banners. She refused to stop until I opened the door. The bass came through the wall. The neighbor’s dog started barking, which I knew would become my problem if it went on, because Brenda fined dogs for duration. Still half asleep, in pajamas, I opened the door. Brenda thrust a one-hundred-fifty-page hedge-maintenance manual into my arms and informed me that my absence had been recorded in my permanent file. I did not even have hedges. I had the lavender, and a Japanese maple the previous owner had planted, and a strip of grass I mowed when it looked like it needed mowing. She told me the absence was the violation, not the hedge. The manual smelled like a fresh print shop. She had paid for it with association money. I would learn that later, in a courtroom, when the receipts came out.
From there, the absurdity snowballed, and it snowballed toward the car, which should have told me the car was next. Monday brought a violation for automotive flamboyance, because my convertible’s red paint was too festive. Festive was not defined. She attached a photograph taken from across the street, the car in my driveway, top up, minding its own business, circled in red marker. Tuesday brought a notice for repeated top-down infractions, claiming my open roof created a draft hazard for neighboring properties. I tried to picture the draft. A seventy-two-degree breeze, legal on a public street, somehow injuring a living room two houses down. By Wednesday she had invented a new category, vehicular nonconformity, and tried to fine me three hundred dollars. I put that one on top of the folder. The phrase did not exist in the covenant. She had written it in the citation block as if naming a thing created the thing.
I had begun saving all her notices partly in case I needed them for court, but mostly because they were so unhinged they were almost entertaining. My favorite was the citation for nocturnal luminosity excess, which she issued after measuring my porch light with a light meter at ten p.m. The bulb was the warm one the hardware store sells for porches. It met the city’s residential standard. It did not meet Brenda’s. She stood on the walk in the dark, meter raised, and wrote the number down like a scientist who had forgotten what science is for. I replaced the bulb with a dimmer one. She measured it again and said the improvement was noted, which is Brenda for “I will be back.”
Then, the day before the convertible incident, another mass email went out. This time she invoked something called emergency protocol 7, a rule no one had ever heard of. According to her, it granted HOA board members emergency powers during periods of community aesthetic crisis. The crisis was the Garcia family. They had planted pink roses instead of red ones. Apparently this posed a threat to the visual harmony of our neighborhood. Mrs. Garcia replied, once, that the roses were a gift from her sister and that she did not intend to pull them. Brenda replied with the protocol number, a deadline, and the phrase “noncompliance will be treated as an active emergency.” People forwarded it to each other with no text, which is how a street says “are you seeing this.” I saved the email. Protocol 7 would matter in the morning, though I did not know that yet. I only knew that a woman who could declare pink flowers a crisis could declare anything a crisis, including my passenger seat.