When neighborhoods become homeowners associations

Used under CC0 license.

I don’t blame them.

It would be easy to say they don’t care about their neighbors, but the fact is that I’ve been so busy and overwhelmed, I don’t reach out to them either.

I’m part of the problem, you see. But problem it is.

I don’t even know the names of most of the people who live around me. The only reason I know the names of the people directly across the street is that they saw me out with candy on the front porch last Halloween and came over to introduce themselves.

I certainly see the irony in the fact that I make my living teaching people to communicate more effectively.

How we got here

We’ve lived here for 15 years. I know the neighbors on each side of us, but have hardly talked to either in the last three or four years. It’s hard, because we have a severely disabled daughter requiring 24-hour nursing, and we have a nursing shortage, so I have to cover a lot of open shifts—sometimes as much as 54 hours a week on top of a full-time job. (We’ve actually had 108 hours open some weeks, but my 20-something son splits it with me.) My wife is also disabled, and so cannot help either with our daughter’s care or with basic stuff around the house.

Under such conditions, I go to work, I take care of our daughter, and I squeeze in sleep when I can. Everything else goes by the wayside.

So it is that the neighbors knew nothing of our recent month of hypercrisis. During that month our daughter had two stays in the hospital, the flu ravaged our whole family, and our oldest son died at age 32.

So they weren’t really being cruel when they, the Homeowners Association, had their lawyer send me a notice that I had ten days to move a nonfunctional vehicle or they would take further legal action.

Our daughter’s wheelchair van died suddenly some months back. Through the generosity of a GoFundMe campaign organized by friends and the timely availability of a reasonably-priced replacement, we had the good fortune to replace it within a month. However, we had no funds to pay someone to haul…