When my item came up, Georgine read the violation history out loud in a pleasant, even voice, like a librarian announcing late fees. She said the board had been more than patient. She said there were standards. She said the entrance to the community was its face, and that people made decisions about whether to buy a home in Piñon Draw within the first ten seconds after they turned off the boulevard, and that those ten seconds were, at the moment, being spent looking at my yard.
I stood up and read the statute. I read the district's Stage 2 order. And then, because I was tired and frustrated and had a six-hundred-dollar water bill in my back pocket, I said something I hadn't planned to say.
"And frankly," I said, "even if I wanted to green it up, I couldn't afford to right now. I've got a leak somewhere on my service line that's costing me forty thousand gallons a month. My June bill was six hundred and eleven dollars. I'm already paying for enough water to keep a golf course alive, and I'm not getting one drop of it on my lawn, and I don't know where it's going." A couple of people laughed, the sympathetic kind. "The district's sending out a leak crew Monday morning with a correlator. Once they find it and I get it fixed, maybe we can talk about my grass. Until then, I'd ask the board to hold off."
I sat down. There was a little murmur in the room. A man in the back said, "Forty thousand? Jeez," and somebody else said, "Those poly lines, man. Same thing happened to my brother-in-law in Castle Pines."
Georgine Vandeventer didn't say anything for a moment. She had been writing on a legal pad while I talked, and she stopped writing, and set the pen down very carefully, parallel to the edge of the pad. She took her reading glasses off and let them drop on their chain. She looked at me, and then past me, out the clubhouse window, which faced north, toward the entrance, toward the Gateway Green and her husband's tree, though from inside you couldn't actually see either one.
"Monday," she said.
"Eight o'clock," I said.