Her husband, Rutger, had been a landscape architect. He'd designed the grounds for half the subdivisions along the Interstate 25 corridor, including ours, and when he'd died of pancreatic cancer in the fall of 2021, the board had voted to name the bench on the Gateway Green after him. There was a little bronze plaque screwed to the back slat. It said RUTGER VANDEVENTER, 1953–2021, HE PLANTED THINGS. The red maple next to the bench was his, too. Not just in the sense that he'd designed the space. He'd planted it himself, a few months before he died, a sapling in a burlap ball, out there on his knees with a shovel while Georgine held the hose. Our neighbor across the court, a retired air traffic controller named Octave Thibodeau, told me that the week we moved in, standing at the property line with a cup of coffee, looking at the Green.
"That tree's a fool," he said. "Red maple. Wrong tree for this country. Wants wet feet and acid soil, and we've got dry feet and caliche. Rutger knew it. He planted it anyway. Said somebody ought to try." He drank his coffee. "Georgine's kept it alive four summers on pure stubbornness. You'll see her out there."
The trouble started with the drought, which is to say the trouble started in April, because that was when the snowpack numbers came in and the district declared a Stage 1 drought, and then in late May, after the driest spring on record along the Front Range, a Stage 2. Stage 2 meant outdoor watering two days a week, before ten in the morning or after six at night, odd addresses on Tuesday and Saturday, even addresses on Wednesday and Sunday. It meant no washing cars in the driveway. It meant a tiered surcharge on every gallon over a household's monthly allocation, with the top tier at four times the base rate. And it meant that the district, which had spent the last three years putting smart meters on every house in town, could see exactly how much water every house was using, hour by hour, from a computer in the basement of the district office on Sixth Street, and could send you a letter about it.
I let our lawn go dormant. It had barely come back from the dead anyway, and I'd spent April and May putting down a mix of buffalo grass and blue grama, which is native, and which turns the color of a lion in July if you don't water it, and comes back green in the fall when the rain does. I put in some rabbitbrush along the side fence, and some penstemon, and a few yards of crushed granite. It looked like Colorado. It looked, to be honest, a little rough, especially next to the Gateway Green, which stayed the color of a billiard table all summer long.
The first violation letter came on June ninth. It cited Article VII, Section 7.4 of the Declaration: All turf areas visible from any street shall be maintained in a green, healthy, and well-groomed condition consistent with the Community-Wide Standard. It gave me fourteen days to cure. The second came on June twenty-sixth and assessed a fine of seventy-five dollars. The third came in July and assessed a fine of a hundred and fifty, with a note that continued violations would be referred to the association's attorney and could result in a lien.
I looked it up, which is a thing I'm good at. Colorado, it turns out, saw this fight coming about twenty years ago. The Common Interest Ownership Act has a section, 106.5, that says an association can't prohibit drought-tolerant landscaping, and can't enforce any rule that requires a homeowner to water turf in violation of water use restrictions declared by a local water provider during a drought. I printed the statute out. I printed the district's Stage 2 order. I wrote a polite letter to the board, citing both, and enclosing photographs of the blue grama and a receipt from the native seed company in Wheat Ridge, and I asked for the fines to be withdrawn.
Georgine wrote back on violet stationery. She said she was very familiar with Colorado water law, thank you, having administered it for three decades. She said the statute protected homeowners from being forced to violate watering restrictions, and that nobody was asking me to violate anything; I was entitled to water two days a week like everybody else, and if I chose not to, that was my right, but the board had the obligation to maintain the Community-Wide Standard, and my lot was the first thing every visitor saw when they turned onto Piñon Draw Boulevard. She said, and I remember this line exactly, The Gateway Green manages to be green, Mr. Osgood. I see no reason your lot cannot.