it's nice having a friend in the
building who pulls me in on jobs once in
a while. it doesn't get much more
convenient than walking out the back
door and into his burly dump truck.
today we returned to queen anne to
continue a project i helped with last fall.
i
love working with wood! cedar,
especially, is so beautiful--the
grain, the smell, the color
variation. it's so lightweight, too,
which makes a difference when you're
humping it up several flights of
stairs on a steep hillside.
it was pleasant
working outside on this day of zero
precipitation (unusual
for 2018), a view of the salish
sea and mountains beyond, the sounds of
seagulls and freight trains talking past
each other in interbay
far below.
yeah, lumber sure
can be pretty, but then i thought
about how much more beautiful the
living trees themselves are
and all the critters displaced for
the sake of delineating one person's
property from another's.
then, as if to confirm my misgivings
about the waste and metaphysical
triviality of the day's mission, the
next door neighbor, let's call her
Pretty Petty, appeared on her side of
the divide to express some, well, concerns
about the property line.
i
wish i had filmed it, because it was
a textbook example of
passive-aggressive seattle at its
finest/worst. to summarize a rather
convoluted situation: years ago, the
former owners of Pretty Petty's
house overstepped their bounds and
built a concrete retaining wall onto
the lot where
we were working, belonging to Goody
Gumdrops (not her real name).
at the time, Goody let it slide,
thinking it would be wasteful to
demolish and rebuild the wall for the
sake of a few inches. it was the
neighborly thing to do. everyone was
happy. but then those people moved out
and the new face of seattle moved in,
complete with legitimizing seahawks ski
hat.
"gee, i'm surprised Goody didn't
come talk to me," said the woman
complaining to the hired help
instead of knocking on Goody's door
(she was home). Pretty Petty invoked
"adverse
possession," saying that
because Goody hadn't taken legal
action within ten years, she gave up
her right to those inches, so the
fence we were building was actually
encroaching on
PP's (vine-choked and too-steep-for-use)
backyard after
all and, well, you know.
"it's a really nice fence we had an
issue with our other neighbor when they
built theirs… it's
ok now, we won, but it was a $30,000
lawsuit…" (nothing like a veiled threat
to keep things friendly!) "it's no big
deal, but it's weird Goody didn't talk
to me first, and since the line moved
because adverse possession [she really
loved saying that], well, we're about to
build an addition [to their already
gigantic house]…"
she spoke in ellipses, sweet
intimations and hints, then
apologized for bothering us because
she knew we were just doing our
jobs, and such a good job it was she
might want to hire us!
lady,
you could
not
pay me enough to work for your
adversely possessed ass!
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