A
few years ago, we had a slight “sinkhole activity” issue at the
house and Joan, the neighborhood HOA Nazi, just couldn't stand it.
When a house in Florida has sinkhole activity, its recorded in Public
Records. Insurance companies keep track of that and when there's
sinkhole activity in a given neighborhood, they make you pay more to
keep the coverage you bought even if you aren't the house with the
problem. When the Nazi's insurance company told her that she'd have
to pay more to keep full coverage, she looked up sinkholes on the
internet, crowned herself an expert and decided that we had created
our own sinkhole problem by over-use of our sprinkler system. That
made it our fault that she had to pay extra for sinkhole coverage.
Never mind that we don't have a sprinkler system. Minutiae like
that only cloud the issue.
She
came over one day while I was out and started her passive-aggressive
whining and bitching but I happened to get home before she left. I
told her that I put more faith in the geologist that said the
sinkhole had been there dormant at least ten thousand years and had
just been reactivated by stresses on the bedrock that came from a
thousand or so houses that sprang up within a few blocks to a couple
of miles from us during the mid 2000s real estate boom. She didn't
even know what an alluvial sinkhole is. Some expert.
She
smiled her Jezebel grin, thanked me for the information, went home
and called the HOA to set her plan for revenge in motion.
The
thing with sinkhole activity is that fixing it takes time. Each
case is different but it generally involves injecting “grout,”
which I can't tell apart from mortar, into the voids in the ground to
recompact the soil under the house and give the steel pins that they
put under the house something solid to bear on.
Injecting
the grout takes a week or two and then it has to cure for a month
before the pins can be driven into place so the whole process takes
about two months even if all goes according to plan.
Joan
is one of those people to which nothing ever just happens. Whenever
something unfavorable happens to her, its because someone did it to
her. Besides us causing her to pay more for sinkhole insurance
through over use of our imaginary sprinkler system, she was also
torqued because she had to buy flood insurance for the first time
since moving to the neighborhood back around 1990. She had not
figured out how to blame that on me but she was convinced that
someone had singled her out, lied to her mortgage holder and make
them think she needed flood insurance. Never mind that FEMA had just
updated the County's Flood Insurance Rate Maps and expanded pretty
much every flood zone to include lots more properties. Never mind
that it had been in the
papers for over two years as the County fought FEMA over it. Never
mind that half of her house was in the flood zone on the new map.
That's just more irrelevant minutiae. In her case, somebody specific had singled her out, gotten her mortgage
holder's information and lied to them about her and her alone. She
couldn't figure out who to strike back against on the flood inurance
trouble but she darned sure knew who made her insurance go up.
Joan
is just fine with a porta-potty in the front yard of a house under
construction for three or four months because those people never did
anything to her. She couldn't stand one in our yard for two or
three months because, in her warped little mind, we caused her
sinkhole coverage to go up with our imaginary sprinkler system.
One
day, about a week after running her off the front porch through the
use of actual facts, my contractor happened to mention getting a call from
the HOA asking whether he could move the porta-potty to the back
yard. He said he told them he'd be glad to as soon as they posted a
ten thousand dollar bond. Somewhat taken aback, they asked what the
bond was about and he explained to them that the truck that services
the pota potty weighs about sixty-thousand pounds and would destroy
my concrete driveway if it had to go to the back yard. My insurance
company would naturally expect the HOA to reimburse them the cost of
the new driveway since there's nothing in our deed restrictions that
says I can't have a porta-potty in my front yard when people are
repairing the house. (By law, facilities for #1 and #2 have to be
available for the workers). That was the end of that conversation.
A
couple of weeks later, I was down at the HOA office paying my dues
and thanked them for working with me on the porta potty issue. I
told them that I didn't understand why it had been an issue when
porta-potties stay in other people's front yards a lot longer than
that one was in mine. That's when they told me “Oh, that was just
Joan.” It seems that she's constantly bitching about something
and they are constantly having to make calls and report back to her
about why they can't make someone bend to her will. That was her idea to
get me back for "causing" her insurance coverage to go up. She
tried to get the HOA to force me to move the porta-potty. Some folks
are just sick.
So
I got to thinking about poor little old Joan. While contemplating
something I once read about praying for people that spitefully use
you, I realized that the other thing that she constantly does besides
bitch is preen her yard. She will spend days in a floppy hat, long
sleeve shirt, long pants, boots and gloves, sitting on a tiny stool
in 96 degree heat and close to 100% humidity plucking little
weed spouts out of her yard. As I thought about the tragedy of a
life spent doing nothing but being a plucking bitch, I got to
thinking that if she had more weeds to pluck she might have less time
to bitch and might even actually make a friend or two. It was a tall
order but if you're gonna dream, you might as well dream big.
Unfortunately, nobody in my town sells weed
seeds. Its like folks expect weeds to just volunteer. Here I had a
plan that was going to give Joan something constructive to do, make
her be nice to the neighbors and maybe even enable her to make some
friends but I had no weapon, I mean, no means to give her the gift
that was going to make it all happen.
So
I got to looking at what weeds grow around here and there's one that,
when its small, looks for all the world like a small turnip plant.
I
have a buddy with a farm about three counties over and asked him to
get me a pound of turnip seeds and to make sure he paid cash. He
asked me if I knew how many seeds that would be. I admitted that I
did not but allowed that it would probably be several thousand and,
if it wasn't at least several thousand could he get me two pounds? A
week or so later I had a paper sack with a pound of Purple Top turnip
seeds.
If
you aren't familiar with turnip seeds, they ain't real big. Maybe
like #4 or #6 bird shot. They don't weigh much either. A pound of
them is about as big as a good sized baking potato. Its more than a
few seeds.
Not
having a spiteful bone in my body and confident that purity of my
motives would carry the day, I proudly showed the bag to The Lovely
Bride.
“Why
do we need a pound of turnip seeds?”
I
explained that I was turning the other cheek, being a good neighbor
and giving Joan something to do that she enjoyed immensely. I
explained that it could end up changing the woman's whole outlook on
life. Before I was done with all the explaining, I was practically
the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future all rolled into one.
My
own wife doubted my veracity.
She
said something about Proverbs 24:8, vengeance belonging to God,
dieing by the sword, that we are supposed to pray for our enemies and stuff like that. By the time she got done, I didn't know whether to wait for
the collection plate or an
altar
call. I put up a spirited defense. I had prayed and this was the
answer that I got. I said that Joan wouldn't be an enemy if she had
something constructive to do. Besides, it was turnips. I wasn't even
taking a sword.
Might
as well have been talking to the wall.
After
three or four days of intransigence on her part, I finally called off
the whole operation. I figured that if I couldn't convince my own
wife that my motives were pure, I probably couldn't convince a jury.
I've
kept my pound of turnip seeds in my reloading room ever since. Every now an then I take them out and dream of what might
have been. How Joan would probably have friends and be happy if
only I had been allowed to intervene. I sometimes wonder if, at my final
reward, I'll be required to answer for the sin of not sowing
thousands upon thousands of turnip seeds in her yard to give her one
last chance at happiness in her declining years. Then I force
myself to move on. No sense in wondering what might have been. We can't change the past. We can only ask for
forgiveness.
Besides,
the seeds probably won't even germinate anymore.
For
the past couple of years, I've had a bunch of young coonties growing
in one of those plastic trays that you buy at Hoes or Lowm Depot for
mixing individual bags of mortar. A month or two ago, I transplanted
them to a flower bed by the driveway. I got to thinking about what
to do with the tray and decided see if my turnip seeds were still
good.
I
filled the tray back up with soil and made a couple of grooves in it.
I sprinkled maybe a teaspoon of turnip seeds into each groove and
covered them up. A little water and a few days later, turnips
started popping up. These seem to be a self-culling variety. At the
start, I had about forty little turnip sprouts going but all but five
died before growing their first real leaves. Those five have thrived.
So
now I have five healthy turnip plants and they will make a nice
little pot of greens. I also still have about 0.9999 pound of
turnip seeds left.
Sowing
and reaping.
I
am blessed just for being willing to help my neighbor.
I
happen to like turnips.
