That evening I unpacked my bag, made coffee, and sat in my backyard for a while just listening to the neighborhood. It was quiet. It was November. The leaves were mostly down and the air was cold and clean.
My phone buzzed, Patricia.
“Board issued their full ruling today.” she said. “Sandra has been removed as HOA president effective immediately. The board has also voted to revise the HOA’s guidelines regarding officer access to private homeowner property. Specifically, they’re removing the provision that allowed the president to retain any form of master access. They’re also recommending that the community hire professional property management company to handle compliance going forward rather than individual residents.”
“Wow.” I said.
“Additionally.” Patricia said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “The four homeowners who filed complaints have each received formal apologies from the board. And the board is reviewing whether any of Sandra’s historical violation notices, including yours, were issued with procedural impropriety.”
“What does that mean for me?”
“It means.” she said, “that every violation notice she ever sent you may be voided from your HOA record including the mailbox post.”
I laughed. It surprised me. I hadn’t expected it to come out that fast, but it did.
“The 3-degree mailbox post.” I said. “Gone.” Patricia said.
I sat there for another minute in the cold backyard drinking my coffee looking at the trees.
Here’s the thing about Sandra Whitmore. I don’t think she She a bad person in the way that word usually gets used. She wasn’t cruel for fun. She wasn’t making anyone’s life miserable because she enjoyed it, or at least that wasn’t the whole reason. I think she genuinely believed in what she was doing. I think she had found in the HOA something that made her feel significant, something that gave her authority in a world where she otherwise felt she had none.
And when you give a certain kind of person that kind of authority with no real oversight and no real accountability, they will always always eventually go too far. She went too far, and the instrument of her overreach was my garage.
There’s a real irony in that, if you think about it. For years, she had been using the rules to push people around, and the one time she decided the rules didn’t apply to her, the one time she helped herself to something that wasn’t hers, it was the thing that brought the whole structure down.
She didn’t knock on my door again after that. She didn’t send me violation notices. She did, about a month later, move out of the neighborhood entirely, sold her house, loaded a moving truck, and left on a gray December morning without ceremony. I heard about it from Tom, who watched the whole thing from his porch.
