Once, she cited a widower because weeds had grown during the month of his wife’s funeral.
Nobody liked her.
But everyone tolerated her because fighting the HOA felt like fistfighting fog—you never actually hit anything solid.
Except I was getting close.
Very close.
—
The thing about being an engineer is that eventually your brain stops asking if there’s a solution.
It starts asking what kind.
And after the forty-seventh tire track appeared across my lawn, I stopped looking at Marlene’s behavior as a neighbor dispute.
I started looking at it as a systems problem.
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