HOA Karen Towed My Car From My Driveway and Parked Hers in My Garage — She Said Her Car Was More Expensive Than Mine
My wife and I moved into the neighborhood a few years ago, and the first night we slept there I woke at two in the morning because the house was too quiet. We had spent twenty years in apartments where the neighbor’s television lived in our wall, where the hallway smelled of someone else’s dinner, where the parking space we paid for could still be taken by a guest who decided the rules were a suggestion. The new house did not smell like anyone else. It smelled like paint that had finally cured and like the lemon oil my wife had rubbed into the stair rail before we carried the first box upstairs. It had a big backyard, a newly renovated kitchen, a two-car garage, and a wide driveway that could take both of our vehicles without either of us having to fold a mirror in or apologize to a bumper. We were on a corner lot. That gave us a little more grass and a little more sky, and it also set the house directly beside the neighborhood community center and the community pool.
I remember standing in the driveway that first evening with the garage door up and both cars inside, and thinking that this was the part of owning a home nobody puts in the advertisement. Not the granite. Not the square footage. The ordinary fact that you could close a door on your own cars and know they would still be there in the morning. My wife came out with two glasses of iced tea and stood beside me. She did not say anything sentimental. She said the left bay was hers because she left for the hospital earlier than I left for the office, and she did not want to back around me in the dark. I said that was fair. We shook on it like people who had negotiated harder things. Then we went inside and ate sandwiches off paper plates because the dishes were still in a box labeled KITCHEN, which we did not open until Sunday.
At first the community center did not seem like a problem. It had its own parking lot, a modest rectangle of asphalt with painted lines and a pair of handicapped spaces near the door. We assumed people would use it. For the first few months, they did. The neighborhood was quiet in the way older suburbs are quiet, which is not the same as empty. You heard mowers on Saturday. You heard the pool gate click in the late afternoon. You heard a child somewhere practicing the same four measures of piano until the phrase finally landed. The people we met were friendly in the limited, useful way of people who have already decided they will wave and will not yet decide whether they will invite you to anything. We were busy. My wife was learning a new shift pattern at the hospital. I was learning which drawer I had promised would hold the batteries and which drawer actually did. We did not go looking for a quarrel. We had spent too many years saving for the down payment to spend the first season hunting one.