"Yeah," I said. "He would have."
I keep that letter in a fireproof file box in the utility room, along with the city electrical permit for a stand-alone system, the final inspection sign-off, the equipment spec sheets, and the architectural approval letter from the Bluebonnet Trace Property Owners Association, signed, as it happens, by Glenda Ashworth.
She had not wanted to sign it. That's another story. I'll get to it.
III.
Glenda Ashworth had been president of the Bluebonnet Trace Property Owners Association since the developer turned the association over to the homeowners, which is to say since before most of us lived there. She was sixty-one, trim, tanned, a former regional manager for a chain of dental offices, and she ran the neighborhood the way I imagine she'd run the dental offices: tight schedule, laminated signs, a deep personal suspicion of anything that wasn't in the binder.
To be fair to her, and I'm going to try to be fair to her all the way through this, a lot of what she did was good. The pool opened on time every Memorial Day. When the Hendersons' oak dropped a limb on their roof, it was Glenda who organized a meal train. She knew every kid's name. She had a husband named Lonnie who drove long-haul for a refrigerated freight company and was gone three weeks out of four, and a grown son who'd gone off to Austin to work in tech, and I think the neighborhood was the thing she had that was hers.
But she did not like my house.
The first time I submitted my plans to the architectural committee, in the fall of 2021, Glenda wrote back that roof-mounted solar was "inconsistent with the aesthetic standards of the community" and denied it. I wrote back, politely, attaching a copy of Section 202.010 of the Texas Property Code, which says, in short, that a property owners association can't prohibit a homeowner from installing solar energy devices on their own roof, with some narrow exceptions about placement and appearance that my plans already met. Glenda replied that the board would be consulting its attorney. A month later, I got the approval letter, with a list of eleven conditions, including that the conduit runs on the exterior walls be painted to match the brick, which I'd planned to do anyway, and that the generator enclosure be "of a natural wood material in a stain color approved by the committee." We went three rounds on the stain color. We ended up with something called Driftwood Gray, which I believe was chosen mostly because I had suggested Cedar Tone.
She signed the approval. She signed it the way you sign a speeding ticket.
After that we had what I'd call a cool peace for about three years. She'd wave from her golf cart. I'd wave back. Once, when the clubhouse microwave quit during the Christmas potluck, she asked me if I knew anything about microwaves, and I fixed the door switch with a paper clip and a little electrical tape, and she said, "Well, aren't you handy," in a tone that made it sound like a diagnosis.
Then, this past spring, three things happened, and I didn't put them together until much later.
The first was in April. I walk Splice in the evenings on the loop trail that goes around the retention pond and past the amenity center, which is what the developer called the clubhouse, the pool, the pavilion, and the little block building behind the pool where the pumps and filters live. One night I noticed a sound coming from the pump house. It wasn't the pool pump; I knew that sound, a low, steady churn. This was higher, a kind of whining roar, like a hair dryer the size of a refrigerator. And the louvered vent near the top of the wall was blowing air hard enough to flutter the grass underneath it.