Meanwhile, Cordelia kept escalating. She called a special board meeting and passed a resolution formally declaring my property a persistent community nuisance and authorizing the board to pursue all available remedies—four votes to one. The single dissenting vote came from a retired gentleman on the board named Fletcher, who told his fellow members the whole campaign was petty, groundless, and likely to cause the HOA serious legal exposure. He said it clearly and on the record. Nobody listened to Fletcher. I made a note to send Fletcher a fruit basket someday.
She also started working the neighborhood socially, the way small-town political operators always do: mentioning at the mailbox that my chickens carried disease, suggesting at the community pool that the smell from my orchard was affecting outdoor enjoyment, implying—always implying without quite saying—that the kind of operation I was running was dragging property values down.
I heard all of it through my friend Della Crowe, who'd bought her Ridgecrest home specifically because she liked living next door to a real working farm. Della was 53, sharp as a tack, and constitutionally incapable of tolerating nonsense.
"She's telling people your chickens are a health hazard," Della told me one Saturday over the fence. "I told her my kids grew up around chickens and are perfectly fine, and she looked at me like I'd said something criminal."
I thanked Della, handed her a dozen eggs and a bag of late-season pears, still warm from the afternoon sun. I also made a mental note: Della, and probably several others in Ridgecrest who were quietly exhausted by Cordelia's administration, might be exactly the allies I'd need when the time came.
I filed the survey results in the manila folder, which was getting satisfyingly thick, and I let Cordelia keep running.
By month four, the fictitious running total on paper had climbed past $8,000. That was when Cordelia made her single biggest tactical error: she brought in an attorney.
His name was Gavin: solo practice, collections specialty. He took the HOA as a client because it was recurring revenue, and he assumed I'd do what most people do when they get a letter on law firm letterhead—fold immediately and write a check. He sent his letter. It was more impressive-looking than the management consultant's letters: it had a proper header, proper formatting, a proper signature block. It was still completely legally empty, but it looked authoritative, and that's usually enough. Gavin threatened to pursue a civil judgment against me for the outstanding balance.
He could not get that judgment. I didn't owe that money. I had never owed that money. But Gavin was either too careless to pull the underlying property documents, or was simply betting that I didn't know my rights well enough to call his bluff. That bet gets made constantly in the collections world; it pays off more often than it should. It did not pay off with me.