When Autumn became engaged to Nolan Reed, a patient man with two young children from an earlier marriage, she asked to hold the wedding near the farmhouse. She wanted the creek in the photographs and her mother's favorite oak tree behind the ceremony. Nolan's daughter Avery was eight and his son Micah was six, both already calling me Grandpa Zeke with the casual confidence of children who have decided a person belongs to them. We planned a small outdoor service, which somehow became a gathering of a hundred and fifty people once the extended families heard about it.
The planning should have been a happy kind of trouble. There were table rentals, a caterer who kept changing her mind about the weather, and arguments over whether the church basement would be needed if October rain arrived early. I spent a week repairing the wooden footbridge near the garden and another evening helping Autumn choose which photographs of Lillian should stand beside the ceremony table. For a while, life seemed generous enough to let us be busy with ordinary things.
Then Cordelia Blackthornne arrived.
She had moved from California and bought one of the largest houses in Willowbrook, a white-and-gray construction overlooking the creek. Her husband Brantley had a consulting business, an expensive watch, and the habit of introducing himself by naming the cities where he had once advised developers. Cordelia had worked as an assistant in a city planning office, a background she mentioned so frequently you would have thought she had been chief architect of every road west of the Mississippi.
Within two years she had served in an interim appointment, a short special term, and a regular election cycle as HOA president. She described that as three terms of proven leadership, which sounded much grander than the actual record. She had cultivated supporters by promising uniform landscaping, stricter enforcement, and higher property values. Those promises landed well among people who had bought homes at the top of the local market and were frightened that one untidy fence might destroy their investment.
Most of my Willowbrook neighbors were decent people. Dalton Greystone, a retired teacher who had lived there nearly thirty years, carried dog biscuits even though he had never owned a dog. Savannah Riverside, a widow with a neat front garden and a sharp eye for numbers, remembered the birthdays of children whose parents had forgotten to introduce them. Preston Ashworth, a former board member, was a quiet accountant who had resigned after too many meetings where questions went unanswered.
Cordelia was different. She believed uniformity proved virtue, and she treated anything outside her authority as a defect in need of correction. My farmhouse offended her because it was old, my gravel drive offended her because it was gravel, and the dam offended her because it had not been built under a design committee she could chair. The first time she walked onto my porch, she looked at Jeremiah's hand-carved posts as though they were evidence of a municipal code violation.