Hey guys, welcome back to more homeowner association stories. Imagine leaving the country for work only to come back and find four brand new houses built on your land complete with an HOA that says you are the problem and that they own your land. When I refuse to back down, they called me a squatter and I honestly don't know what to do. Here is what happened.
So, this happened over the span of a few years, and it starts with a little rectangle of dirt that I thought would someday be my quiet place. Before everything, my life was pretty normal. I had a job that let me work remotely for stretches, and I'd always wanted some space that was not cramped between walls and traffic. I bought a small chunk of land just outside of town. Not big enough to run cattle or anything, but big enough that I could wander around with a coffee in the morning and not see anyone if I didn't want to. There was a scraggly tree line on one side, a gully that filled up after storms, and a view of a sunset that made me feel like I was living in a postcard.
It was not too fancy, no utilities, no structures, just dirt and potential and a couple of survey stakes with neon tape that flapped in the wind like they were happy to be there. I bought the parcel outright with savings. And I know some people will ask, so yeah, I had title insurance and yes, the deed was recorded properly. The legal description on my deed was something out of a geometry final, meets and bounds, bearings and degrees, distances from iron pins. I didn't fully get it at first, but the title company walked me through it with a highlighter and a plat. They even gave me a laminated copy of the plat map. I stuck it in my folder with the closing docs and put that folder in a fireproof safe because my dad raised me right.
A few months after closing, I had to leave the country for work for what was supposed to be a long-term assignment. It came with housing and a stipend and honestly it was a career break I couldn't pass up. I love my job and I didn't plan on building on the land yet anyway. Taxes were low because it was so unimproved. I set up automatic payments for property taxes. Told the neighbor I trusted that he could park his trailer near the edge if he wanted and then I left. That was the last time I saw my little slice of quiet for a long while.
I kept busy. I sent postcards to family and ate a lot of food that I cannot easily get back home. Every once in a while, I would open my email to see the county tax notice come through, verify the amount, and file it away in a folder called do not mess up. My neighbor would occasionally send me a photo after a storm just to say your tree survived or the gully is still a gully. Nothing looked off. Nothing hinted at the mess brewing.
What I didn't mention yet is that keeping busy ended sooner than I planned. About 18 months into the assignment, I got a call at 3:00 in the morning. My mom's voice was steady in that terrifying way. That means she's been crying for hours and has no tears left. "It's your grandma. You need to come home."
Grandma had raised me as much as my parents had. When I was little and my folks both worked double shifts, she was the one who walked me to the bus stop and made sure I knew my multiplication tables. She taught me to fold fitted sheets, even though I still cannot do it right. She showed me how to make her biscuits, which required Crisco and a light hand and approximately zero measurements because you just know when the dough feels right, baby. And she was the one who sat with me the night before I bought the land and asked if I was sure, not because she doubted me, but because she wanted me to doubt myself just enough to be certain. When I told her about this craggly tree line, the sunset, she smiled and said, "That sounds like a place where you can hear yourself think." I didn't know then that those words would loop in my head years later like a prior.
The cancer had been quiet. She had some tests done while I was overseas, brushed off the early symptoms as getting old, and by the time they found it, it had already made itself at home in her lungs, liver, and bones. The doctors gave her 6 months. She lasted four.
I came home on an emergency flight that felt like it took years. I went straight from the airport to the hospice facility, which is a term that sounds clinical until you're walking down a hallway that smells like antiseptic trying to cover up something sadder. Her room was small. There was a window with blinds that didn't close all the way. There were flowers from the church ladies and a quilt from her sister and a whiteboard with her medication schedule written in someone else's handwriting because she could not hold a pen anymore.
She looked so small. That's the thing they don't tell you about watching someone die. They shrink. Not just physically, though that's part of it. It's like they are already pulling away into some other dimension, and what's left is just an outline. Her hands were paper thin and bruised from IVs. Her hair, which she had always kept curled and sprayed into submission, lay flat and gray against a pillow. But when she saw me, her eyes lit up the way they always had, and for half a second, she looked like herself again. "You came back," she whispered. "Of course I came back," I said, and my voice cracked so hard I had to sit down.
My mom and my aunt were there too, taking shifts, but grandma wanted me close at night. She said that I was good company and did not hover like a hummingbird, which was her way of saying that I knew when to sit quiet and when to talk. I slept on the pullout couch in her living room so I could hear her if she needed anything. Most nights she would call out around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, not because she needed help, but because the fear would get too big in the dark and she needed to hear a voice. I would go sit in the chair next to her bed and hold her hand, which felt like holding a bird, and she would talk about things that didn't matter, and everything that did.
She told me stories I'd heard a hundred times, and some I hadn't. She told me about her first car, a green Ford that barely ran, and how she had learned to drive on gravel roads because that's all there was. She told me about my grandpa, who had been gone 15 years, but who she still missed like a phantom limb. She told me she was proud of me for buying the land and for taking the job overseas, for not being afraid to want something, and she cried once late at night and said that she was sorry she wouldn't get to see what I built there. I told her that was okay, that I'd build it anyway, and think of her. She squeezed my hand with what strength she had and said, "You'd be better. Don't let it just sit there like a dream you're scared to touch."