For five seconds, in a folding chair in a room I’ve paid to heat for thirty-four years, I heard my own friend Marge laugh — three rows up, with her hand over her mouth, the way she laughs at things she doesn’t mean — and my grandson looked at me sideways to see what my face was going to do. Then I said what I said, and the president told me this wasn’t the forum, and I told him it was exactly the forum, because he was standing on it. Bill deeded the two acres to the association in 1991 with a reversion clause: if the land ever ceased to be used for the common benefit of all lot owners, it came back to him or his heirs. He wrote it that way because he’d watched a board in Guilford County sell a playground out from under people. Nobody on that board in 1991 read it closely. Nobody since has read it at all.
They’d been renting the clubhouse out. Eleven events since 2022, to non-residents, cash, and the money went into a maintenance line nobody could account for. That’s what my fence citation was actually about — I’d asked about the ledger in April and gotten nothing, and asked again in June, and in July my fence became a matter of community standards. I hired a lawyer in August, and she wrote one letter, and it didn’t threaten anything. It just quoted the clause and asked for the books.
They produced the books in October. The president resigned in November and told people it was his back. Nobody has apologized to me and I’ve stopped expecting it — this is a neighborhood, not a family, and people here can hold a grudge and wave in the same motion. I didn’t take the land. My lawyer asked if I wanted to trigger the reversion and I said no, because Bill gave it to them on purpose and I’m not going to undo the one generous thing anybody remembers him for. Marge brought a pie in December. I took it and thanked her and we talked about her hip. The fence is still up. It’s crooked on the north end, where he stopped.
