The HOA president fined me $2,000 for a maple tree my late husband planted 41 years ago. Then she sent a crew to cut it down while I was at his grave. I came home to sawdust. And a stump. And a note taped to my door: “Rules are rules, Mrs. Fairhurst. Some of us care about this neighborhood.” The whole street watched me read it. I didn’t cry. I folded the note, went inside, and opened the cedar chest where my husband kept the original land papers . He’d always said, “Leo, if anyone ever gives you trouble, read page four.” So I read page four. Then I laughed out loud. Because page four said that.
the strip of land under the clubhouse, the pool, and the HOA president’s own driveway had never belonged to the homeowners’ association at all.
It belonged to me.
My husband, Roy, had been a surveyor. In 1983, when the developer was carving up the old Linden farm into a subdivision, Roy had bought our lot and the narrow strip of land beside it — a little over half an acre. The developer, short on cash, had leased that strip back from Roy for ninety-nine years at one dollar a year so he could build the clubhouse and the pool.
The lease had one condition. Roy had written it in himself, in plain words, on page four.
“The trees on the lessor’s property, including the red maple planted in 1983, shall not be cut, damaged, or removed by the association or its agents. Any violation of this clause shall terminate this lease immediately, and all improvements shall revert to the lessor.”
All improvements. The clubhouse. The pool. Forty feet of the HOA president’s driveway.
I sat down on the edge of the cedar chest and laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Roy had loved that tree. He planted it the week we found out I was expecting our first child. Apparently, he’d loved it enough to protect it with a legal clause nobody had read in four decades.
The next morning I called our old family lawyer’s office. The lawyer himself had retired, but his daughter, Nina Castellano, had taken over. She drove out that afternoon, read page four three times, and then looked out my kitchen window at the stump.
“Mrs. Fairhurst,” she said, “do you have photographs of the tree?”
“Forty-one years of them.”
“And the note?”
I handed it to her. She held it by the corner like it was evidence at a crime scene, which, I suppose, it was.
“Then I think we should call a meeting,” she said.
The HOA held its monthly meeting at the clubhouse. My clubhouse, as it turned out. I’d stopped going years ago because the president, a woman named Cheryl Vandyke, ran the meetings like a small army and had once fined Mr. Okafor across the street for leaving his garbage can out ninety minutes too long.
I went that Thursday with Nina beside me and my cedar box under my arm.
Cheryl saw me come in and smiled thinly. “Mrs. Fairhurst. If this is about the tree, the decision was final. The roots were damaging the sidewalk.”
“The roots were damaging nothing,” I said. “But I’m not here to argue about the sidewalk.”
Nina stood up, introduced herself, and passed out copies of the 1983 lease. She read page four aloud, slowly, in a voice that carried to the back of the room.
There were about thirty people there. I watched their faces change as they understood. Mr. Okafor put his hand over his mouth. The Delgado twins from the end of the street looked at each other and grinned.
Cheryl turned white. “That’s — that’s not valid. That’s ancient. Nobody follows things like that.”
“It was recorded with the county in 1983,” Nina said pleasantly. “It’s referenced in the HOA’s own founding documents, on page twelve. I’d be happy to show you. The association’s board signed off on it every time the clubhouse was refinanced. Including you, Mrs. Vandyke, in 2021.”
The room went very quiet.
“As of the day that tree was cut down,” Nina went on, “the lease is terminated. Mrs. Fairhurst now owns the clubhouse, the pool, and the portion of land under your driveway.”
