The woman across the cul-de-sac had been bringing my mother a poinsettia every Christmas for seventeen years, so I called her before I did anything else. I asked whether she’d requested the new rule, and she said no, absolutely not, and that she hadn’t even known there was a vote. Then she asked me why I was asking, and I told her about the feeding tube and the revoked gate code. She went quiet and said the last time she’d spoken to anyone on the board was in May, when she’d mentioned that my mother’s aide was coming too often and that she was worried strangers were using the neighborhood entrance. I asked what she meant by strangers. She said she had seen different people coming to my house and assumed they were all caregivers. I told her there was only one aide, and she’d been coming for months. Then the woman said something that changed the whole conversation: she’d been keeping track of the aide’s visits because someone on the board had asked her to.
I requested the complete minutes from the May meeting, including the attachments and correspondence referenced in the minutes. The association attorney sent me the one-page resolution again and said there was nothing else relevant. My lawyer disagreed. She subpoenaed the board’s email records, and that’s where we found the discussion that never appeared in the minutes. Three board members had objected to the three-visit limit because they knew it could interfere with medical care, but the president said the restriction was necessary because “the situation at Lot 18 has become excessive.” My lot. I asked what exactly they meant by excessive, and one email said the board had concerns about “unusual activity” at my house. Another mentioned deliveries, medical equipment, and people arriving before sunrise. None of that violated any covenant. Then my lawyer found the email that had started the discussion. It came from the woman across the street.
She had written that she was concerned about “the number of vehicles” visiting my property and asked whether the association could do something about it. I confronted her, and she immediately apologized. She said she’d only complained because the board president had told her my mother’s caregiver was bringing unauthorized people into the neighborhood and that there had been complaints about thefts. I asked whether she’d ever actually seen anyone steal anything. She said no. Then I asked why she had been counting the visits. She looked embarrassed and said the president had given her a notebook and asked her to write down the dates and times whenever someone came to my house. My lawyer asked the association for that notebook. They denied knowing anything about it. But the woman’s daughter found it in her mother’s kitchen that evening, and on every page were the dates of my mother’s caregiver’s visits — along with handwritten notes beside them from the board president saying, “Keep watching. We need enough to remove them.”
