Nothing illegal exactly, just the kind of things that slowly wear on you. Still, I kept my mouth shut because construction doesn’t last forever. Eventually, the structure started to take shape, and that’s when I noticed something that bothered me a little. The back of the new house had these enormous windows. Floor to ceiling glass panels facing directly toward my backyard.
I remember standing on my deck one evening with my neighbor Dave from across the street, watching the framing go up. Dave squinted at it and said, “That’s a lot of window pointed right at your place.” I laughed it off. Yeah, well, guess they like trees. But the truth was, I already had a feeling where this was headed.
Privacy in suburbs is this weird fragile thing. Technically, everyone has their own property. But if someone builds the wrong window in the wrong place, suddenly your backyard doesn’t feel like yours anymore. Still, windows are windows. You can close blinds. I wasn’t going to start a war over architecture. By late summer, the house was almost finished.
White siding, black trim, that modern farmhouse style you see all over HGTV now. Clean lines, very deliberate. The backyard side of the house had this second story living area with sliding glass doors that looked out over the property. At the time, that’s all it was. Just doors, no balcony, no deck, nothing sticking out.
Then in October, I had to leave town for a week. Guard training out in Missouri. Nothing dramatic, just routine stuff. I locked up the house, asked Dave to keep an eye on things, and figured when I came back, the construction would probably be done. And in a way, it was, just not in the way I expected. Because when I pulled into my driveway that Sunday afternoon, rolled my suitcase through the side gate, and stepped into my backyard, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the house.
