The work shirt with my company name stitched over the pocket, the boots, the gray coming in at my temples, the fact that I was standing in a metal building instead of an office. Then she asked with a smile that never reached her eyes, "Are you a land attorney?" I said, "No." I said I would recommend she read the recorded documents before she made plans around that pole.
I said it once calmly in a normal voice because I have learned that when somebody has already decided who you are, volume does not change their mind. She told me the association had a landscape architect, a contractor, a budget, and two years of discussion behind it.
She told me the pole was, and I am quoting her because I wrote it down that evening, an eyesore attached to a parcel that has not been maintained to community standards. My parcel is not in her community.
It is not in her association. It has never paid a dollar of her dues, and it is not bound by a single line of her covenants.
I told her that, too. Vanessa put her sunglasses back on, which I came to understand was her way of ending a conversation, and said she would have her contractor coordinate with me as a courtesy.
Then she drove off, and I stood there in the doorway of my shop, thinking about how the word courtesy had just been used to mean permission she did not believe she needed. Two days later, I came out at first light to check the water trough on the east fence, and there was orange paint on the ground around the base of the pole.
Four short marks in a rough square, and a longer arrow pointed west toward the subdivision. Nobody had called me.
Nobody had knocked. Somebody had walked 14 feet onto my land in the dark and marked out a footprint around a live piece of the electric distribution system.
I photographed the marks from six angles that morning with the fence line in frame so the property boundary was obvious and I saved the files with the date. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold beside me and wrote the first of what became three written warnings.
I kept it short and unemotional. I stated that the parcel was privately held, that the pole and overhead conductors sat within a recorded utility corridor, that neither the association nor its contractors had authorization to enter or perform work, and that any question about the equipment needed to go to the electric utility directly.
I sent it to Vanessa and copied the association's general mailbox so it would land in more than one inbox. Her reply came in under an hour and it was three sentences long.
She thanked me for my input. She said the association was working with licensed professionals.
She said she trusted I would not stand in the way of an improvement that benefited 180 families. 4 days after that, a letter arrived on association stationery addressed to me at my own mailbox requesting that I cooperate with the community revitalization plan.
The letter was a small masterpiece of implication. It referenced architectural review.
It referenced setback consistency. It referenced the board's authority to approve improvements within the community.
And then in the very next line, it described the front entrance improvements as including removal of obsolete overhead structures at the northeast approach. Nowhere did it say the association had authority over my land.
It just arranged the sentences so a careless person would assume it did. I wrote back a numbered response because numbered responses are harder to misquote later.