Get Off My Lawn!

[Martin Hash]

When I moved into my neighborhood a quarter century ago, it wasn’t yet a gated community and there were lots of children. The kids would run through my hedge maze and walk along my miniature-gauge steam train railroad tracks. It was idyllic but things don’t stay the same, and as the kids grew up and the neighborhood aged, more older people moved in to replace them. I can’t say there are things more disappointing in life than trying to go back to your youth: my neighborhood is now of the “Get off my lawn!” variety, literally.

All the yards have grass lawns with no curbs which invites the occasional tire tracks, especially after its been raining. There’s lots of reasons for these tracks, the biggest one being that large lawncare vans park in the road causing other cars to overcorrect when they go around them, but there’s also lots of delivery trucks with professional drivers that are accustomed to cutting corners, plus trucks turning around in the middle of the street. There has been intentional vandalism but it's just grass, and all you have to do is walk on the humps to flatten it out then wait a couple weeks for mother nature to repair the damage. Apparently, that’s not a good enough fix, and combined with the ownership complex of old people, has resulted in more proactive attempts of keeping cars of their lawns.

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So, even though the neighborhood has strict CC&Rs that restrict almost anything: building, fencing, landscaping, how many cars you can have in your driveway, truly authoritarian stuff, to prevent cars from driving on their lawns, they’ve installed big, truly ugly rocks along the perimeter of the road. The rules say that a fence has to be 3’ back but these rocks are right on the edge of the asphalt. Of course, it was members of the HOA board that did it. I hate the whole concept but there was a bright spot.

One of the houses in the neighborhood went up for sale and had an estate sale. People who have never been to an estate sale have no idea how crazy those things can get and how busy they are, bargain-hunters looking for a great deal. The frenzy around this one was made more complicated because there’s really no place to park except along the narrow street, and with the rocks along the edge, caused cars to park a couple feet further into the roadway. Apparently, some overly excited shopper squeezed their car between two of the rocks and drove directly on my neighbor’s wet lawn, leaving deep, muddy ruts along the way, so-much-so that they got stuck. My rock-loving neighbors all rushed to the scene, pulling their hair and open & closing their mouths incoherently. What made the moment even more exquisite was that I was walking by at the time and, wait for it… There was another car trying to follow the first onto the lawn and one of my neighbors was pushing against the hood trying to stop it.

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