Here is what I did connect, because it would have been hard not to. Within about six weeks of the owl camera going up, I began receiving letters from the Kestrel Run Homeowners Association.
The first one was about the camera itself. It informed me that "exterior surveillance devices" exceeding a certain size required prior approval from the Architectural Review Committee, which I had not obtained. Fair enough. I filled out the form. The committee, which met in Sheryl Kinsella's dining room, denied it. The reason given was "privacy concerns raised by adjacent owners." There was exactly one adjacent owner on that side.
So I went over. I rang Sheryl's bell on a Saturday morning and stood on her porch with my laptop and said I understood completely, nobody wants to feel watched, and I'd like to show her what the camera could see. And I did. I showed her the owl box, the yard, the shed. I showed her that the right edge of the frame caught the corner of her backyard, her clothesline, and the back of her house. And then I showed her the software's privacy masking feature, which lets you draw black boxes over any part of the image that will never be recorded at all, and I drew one over every window and door on the back of her house, and over her patio, while she watched.
"The clothesline is still in it," she said.
"It's right on the line where the owls hunt," I said. "They come down on the lawn there. Mice love the grass under it. If I mask that, I lose a third of what the kids need." I offered to mask it anyway. I want that on the record too. She looked at the screen for a long time, and then she said, "That won't be necessary," in the tone some people use for "I'll be in touch."
The committee approved the camera two weeks later, with conditions. I complied with all of them.
The letters didn't stop. They just moved on.
My trash cans were visible from the street on a non-collection day. They were, for about four hours, because I'd had a parent conference. My shed, which had been Heritage Sage for three months, was found to be "a shade inconsistent with the approved Heritage Sage swatch," a claim I tested by taking the swatch out to the shed and holding it up against the wall and photographing it in full daylight, and which was quietly dropped. The owl box post was over the six-foot height limit for "accessory structures." It had been there since 1986, but the HOA had been formed in 1997, and I learned the word "grandfathered" and also the phrase "the Board does not recognize grandfathering absent documented prior approval." I appealed. I won. It took four months.
And then, in July, I received a notice informing me that my property was in violation of Article VII, Section 4, "Harborage of Nuisance Wildlife," on account of the fox den under my shed, and that I had thirty days to have the animals "removed by a licensed operator."
I called the state wildlife office. A very patient woman explained to me that the kits were nearly grown and would disperse on their own by fall, that gray foxes were native and beneficial and almost never a danger to people, and that if the HOA wanted to argue otherwise they were welcome to call her. I put all that in a letter, along with her name and direct number, and sent it to the board. Nobody called her. The violation was "held in abeyance."
Somewhere in there, the real estate letters started too.
They came from a local agent named Shawna Biddle, on heavy cream paper with a photograph of Shawna smiling in front of a sold sign. The first one said that she had a client who was "very interested" in homes on Kestrel Court and wondered if I'd ever considered selling. The second, a month later, named a number, twenty-two thousand dollars over what I'd paid. The third, in August, named a higher number and included the line, "My client has a deep personal connection to your home and would be able to close quickly and in cash."
I threw the first two away. I kept the third one in a kitchen drawer, not because I was considering it, but because the phrase "deep personal connection" had snagged on something in me and I couldn't figure out what.