My name is Robert, and I want to tell you about the summer I learned that the shortest distance between a reasonable man and an unreasonable one is a five foot wooden fence and a brother-in-law named Gary.
I should say up front that I am not, by nature, a fighter. I spent thirty-one years as a claims adjuster for a regional insurance company before I took an early retirement package two years ago, and if that job teaches you anything, it teaches you patience. It teaches you to document. It teaches you that most conflicts, if you approach them calmly and keep good records and give people every reasonable chance to do the right thing, will resolve themselves without anyone having to raise their voice. I believed that. I built a whole career and a whole temperament around believing that.
Gary spent four months teaching me the limits of it.
Let me set the scene, because the geography matters. My wife Linda and I live in a modest three bedroom ranch on a quiet street in a subdivision that went up in the late seventies. We bought it eleven years ago, paid off the mortgage two years back right around when I retired, which was the plan all along, to walk into retirement owning our home free and clear so that the fixed income from my pension and our retirement accounts would stretch. We are not wealthy people.
We are careful people. There’s a difference, and it’s a difference that becomes very important in this story.
The house behind ours, sharing our rear property line, belongs to Gary and my sister-in-law Cheryl. Cheryl is Linda’s younger sister. They bought that house about six years ago, partly, I’ll admit, because we told them the neighborhood was nice and the house behind us had come up for sale. Linda was thrilled. Her sister, right behind us, the kids able to run back and forth. At the time it seemed like a wonderful thing.
Our two backyards are separated by a single wooden privacy fence, the kind with the vertical planks, and it is barely five feet tall. It was there when we bought the place. It’s on the property line, shared, which as I would later learn in great detail is a legally significant fact.
Now. The garden.My garden is the thing I retired into. I don’t know how else to explain it to someone who isn’t a gardener. For thirty-one years I sat in an office and on the road looking at other people’s water damage and hail damage and the slow entropy of things falling apart, and I dreamed, honestly dreamed, about the day I’d have time to put my hands in the dirt and make something grow instead. The back quarter of our yard is raised beds I built myself the first spring after I retired, good cedar, filled with soil I amended over two seasons. I grow tomatoes, more varieties than any two people could reasonably eat, and peppers and beans and squash and a whole bed of herbs, and along the back I’ve got berry bushes coming in nicely, and I compost, and I’ve got a little drip irrigation system I rigged up that I’m probably prouder of than anything I accomplished in three decades of adjusting claims.
It is, without exaggeration, the great pleasure of my later life. Linda teases me that I love the tomatoes more than I love her. I always tell her it’s close.
The garden runs right up along that shared fence. Which brings us to Gary.
About four months ago, in the late spring, I started noticing piles of yard debris appearing along my side of the fence. Grass clippings, mostly, at first. Hedge trimmings. It always showed up after the weekend, and I knew Gary did his yard work on Saturdays, because you could hear his mower going, an aggressive whine that started at eight in the morning sharp and made Linda mutter into her coffee.
The first couple of times, I honestly assumed it was the wind. Clippings blow around. A gust catches a light pile and scatters it, and some of it ends up on the wrong side of a five foot fence. That’s not malice, that’s meteorology. So I raked it up, added it to my own compost pile, actually, because grass clippings are good nitrogen, and I didn’t think anything more about it.
Then one Saturday in early June I went out to check on my tomatoes and found an entire garbage bag’s worth of leaves and clippings dumped directly on top of them. Not blown. Not scattered. Dumped. A whole heaped pile of the stuff sitting on my heirloom Brandywines, the ones I’d started from seed under a grow light in my basement back in March, babied along, hardened off, transplanted with such care. The weight of the wet clippings had bent two of the plants right over and snapped the main stem on a third.
You can’t blame the wind for a bag’s worth of debris deposited in a single tidy pile on top of the one thing in the yard I cared about most. The wind doesn’t aim.
I stood there that morning looking at my broken tomato plant, and I felt the first real flush of anger, and I told myself to calm down, to be reasonable, to assume the best. Maybe Gary hadn’t realized. Maybe he’d tossed the bag over the fence not thinking about what was on the other side. People do thoughtless things without meaning harm. Thirty-one years of claims work had taught me that most damage isn’t malicious, it’s just careless.
So I decided to bring it up gently. Keep it light. We had a family dinner coming up that weekend, the four of us plus Cheryl and Gary’s two kids, and I figured that was the natural place to mention it, casual, no big confrontation.
We were sitting around Linda’s dining room table, and there was a lull in the conversation, and I said, in the friendliest voice I could manage, “Hey Gary, I think some of your yard clippings have been ending up on my side of the fence.
Landed right on my tomatoes last week, actually, broke a couple of them. Mind keeping it on your side going forward?”
I kept it so light. I even smiled.
Gary laughed. He’s a big guy, Gary, loud, one of those men who’s decided that being loud is the same as being funny, and he laughed and waved his fork and said, “Oh come on, Rob, it’s basically the same yard anyway.”
The same yard.
I remember Cheryl laughing a little too, and Linda giving me a look across the table that said let it go, and I let it go, because it was dinner and there were kids present and I am, as I’ve established, not by nature a fighter.
But I want to be clear about something, because it became the whole crux of the matter. It was not, in fact, the same yard.
