My husband Alden has been gone for two years now, and I want to tell you about the morning our homeowners association president stood at the edge of my driveway in Lorne Valley, Kansas, looked at the little garden I had planted for him along our side fence, and told me, calm as reading a grocery list, that grief does not buy a variance. His name was Reginald Larkspur. He had a clipboard in one hand and a printed notice in the other, and he handed me that notice the way a man hands you a parking ticket, like it was nothing personal, like it did not cost him a single thing to do it. Fifty dollars, the first one said. Unauthorized landscaping structure, section fourteen, subsection two. I want you to understand that section fourteen, subsection two did not exist. Not the way he used it. It took me the better part of a year, and a woman named Estelle Merrivale, and a binder that had been sitting in the back of a hall closet for eleven years, to prove that, but I am getting ahead of myself, and this is not a story I want to rush, because it took me a long time to live it and I think it deserves to be told the way it happened.
I should tell you first who I was before any of this, because I think it matters. My name is Maribel Ingram. I am fifty-nine years old, and I have lived in Lorne Valley my whole life except for four years in Manhattan, Kansas, at the state university, where I met Alden in a night class on small-engine repair that I had signed up for on a dare from my roommate and he had signed up for because he actually wanted to learn something. We married the summer after I graduated. Alden went to work for the county roads department, running a grader in the winter and a mower in the summer, the kind of job where a man comes home every night smelling like diesel and cut grass and you learn to love both smells because they mean he is home. We raised two kids in Lorne Valley, a son who is out in Colorado Springs now with the Air Force, and a daughter, Adaline, who stayed close, over in Ellsworth with her own family, twenty-five minutes down the highway.
Twelve years ago, when Alden’s knees finally told him the roads department wasn’t a young man’s game anymore, we sold the little house we’d raised our kids in and bought a smaller place out at the edge of town, in a subdivision called Cottonwood Bend. It was new then, thirty some houses built around a shared retention pond and a stand of cottonwood trees the developer had the good sense to leave standing, and it came, like every subdivision built after a certain year, with a homeowners association. We did not think much of it at the time. We paid our forty dollars a month, we mowed our lawn, we waved at our neighbors, and for a long while the HOA was exactly what it is supposed to be for most people: invisible. A line item on a bank statement. A newsletter nobody read cover to cover.
Alden was not a man who cared much for rules he thought were foolish, but he was scrupulous about the ones he thought were fair, and he read that stapled covenant packet cover to cover the week we closed on the house, because that was simply how his mind worked, careful with paper the same way he was careful with an engine. He used to say a subdivision covenant was like a carburetor: most of the trouble people had with either one came from somebody adjusting a part they never bothered to understand first. He would have been the first one at that podium asking Reginald Larkspur to show his work, and some nights, in the thick of all this, I found myself wishing so hard he was still here to do exactly that, that I had to go sit on the back step a minute and let it pass through me before I could keep going.
Alden died on a Tuesday in March, two years ago this spring, of a heart that gave out while he was out at the shop behind our house fixing a neighbor’s riding mower for free, the way he fixed half the small engines in Cottonwood Bend for free, because that was simply who he was. I found him sitting on his work stool, like he had just decided to rest a minute. I have told that part of the story exactly twice out loud since it happened, once to my daughter and once to a hospice grief counselor I saw for six sessions, and I am telling it to you now because I think you cannot understand what came later without understanding what that loss did to me, and what that garden meant.
