Alden was not a man who cared much for rules he thought were foolish, but he was scrupulous about the ones he thought were fair, and he read that stapled covenant packet cover to cover the week we closed on the house, because that was simply how his mind worked, careful with paper the same way he was careful with an engine. He used to say a subdivision covenant was like a carburetor: most of the trouble people had with either one came from somebody adjusting a part they never bothered to understand first. He would have been the first one at that podium asking Reginald Larkspur to show his work, and some nights, in the thick of all this, I found myself wishing so hard he was still here to do exactly that, that I had to go sit on the back step a minute and let it pass through me before I could keep going.
Alden died on a Tuesday in March, two years ago this spring, of a heart that gave out while he was out at the shop behind our house fixing a neighbor’s riding mower for free, the way he fixed half the small engines in Cottonwood Bend for free, because that was simply who he was. I found him sitting on his work stool, like he had just decided to rest a minute. I have told that part of the story exactly twice out loud since it happened, once to my daughter and once to a hospice grief counselor I saw for six sessions, and I am telling it to you now because I think you cannot understand what came later without understanding what that loss did to me, and what that garden meant.
For the first several months I did not do much of anything. Adaline came by most weekends. My son called every Sunday from Colorado. The neighbors brought casseroles the way people do, and then, the way people do, they stopped, and the house got very quiet, and I got very good at moving through it without really being in it. It was Estelle Merrivale, my oldest friend in Lorne Valley, who finally sat me down at my own kitchen table that fall and told me I needed something to put my hands in the dirt for, and that Alden would have wanted a place that was his in that yard he loved so much, not just a name on a headstone forty minutes away in the county cemetery I could not bring myself to visit more than twice a year.
So I built him a garden. It sat along the side fence line of our lot, visible from the street but tucked in its own corner, nothing grand. A flat granite marker, the size of a stepping stone, with his name and his dates and the words HE FIXED WHAT HE COULD carved into it, because that is exactly what he did, for machines and for people both. A small stone bench beside it that I found at an estate sale two counties over. A birdbath. A young redbud tree that I planted the first spring after he was gone, because he had always wanted one in that spot and never gotten around to it. Black-eyed susans and sunflowers along the border, because those were the flowers that grew wild along the county roads he used to grade, and every time I see one now I think of him behind the wheel of that yellow grader with the window down.
I did not ask the HOA’s permission to build it. I want to be honest about that, because it matters to what came later. I looked at our copy of the covenants, the same stapled packet every homeowner gets when they close on a house, and I saw nothing that said a homeowner could not put a garden bed, a bench, and a small marker along their own side fence, well within the setback lines, no taller than eighteen inches, nothing that blocked a sidewalk or a sightline. I did not think twice about it. It took four months to fill in, and by the following June it was, without question, the most beautiful thing in our yard, and I sat on that little stone bench most evenings with a glass of tea and told Alden about my day, the way some people go to a graveside and I went twenty feet from my own back door.
Adaline came out from Ellsworth the weekend I finished planting the sunflower border, and she stood at the edge of the yard for a long minute before she said anything at all, and then she just said it looked like him, which is exactly the thing I had been hoping somebody besides me would see. My son called that Sunday, the way he always did, and I walked the phone out into the yard so he could hear the wind chime Alden’s brother had sent from Colorado moving in the breeze, and he went quiet on the line the way his father used to go quiet when something moved him too much to talk about right away. Those were good months. I want that on the record too, before I tell you about the notices, because I do not want this to read like a story that was only ever sad. That garden gave me back some part of my evenings I had thought was gone for good, and for nine months it belonged to nobody but Alden and me.
The first notice came in August, fourteen months after Alden died, nine months after I finished the garden. It was a single sheet of paper, folded once, taped to my front door rather than mailed, which I would later understand was not an accident. FIRST NOTICE OF VIOLATION, it said at the top, in a font I recognized from every other HOA letter Cottonwood Bend had ever sent, official-looking, with our subdivision’s little cottonwood-leaf logo in the corner. Unauthorized landscaping structure and non-compliant memorial marker, side yard, Lot 22, it read. Reference: Cottonwood Bend Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions, Article 14, Section 2, Beautification and Compliance Standards. Fine assessed: fifty dollars, due within thirty days. Signed, Reginald Larkspur, HOA President.
I remember standing in my own front hallway reading that notice three times, waiting for it to make sense, the way you reread a word until it stops looking like a real word. I called the number on the letter. Reginald Larkspur picked up on the second ring, pleasant as anything, and told me the board had recently updated the beautification standards to address, in his words, “structures and features that could affect resale values and neighborhood cohesion,” and that memorial markers and non-standard hardscaping fell under the new policy. I asked him, politely, when the board had voted on this. He said it had been discussed at a recent meeting and I was welcome to review the minutes at the next general session, eight weeks out. I asked him if there was any exception for something like this, a marker for my husband, and that is when he said the sentence I have not been able to fully shake since. He said it calmly, without a trace of anything you could call cruelty in his voice, which somehow made it worse. Grief doesn’t buy you a variance, Maribel. Rules are rules for everybody, or they’re rules for nobody.
