Some stories do not need embellishment. Some stories are so complete in themselves, so perfectly shaped by the actual sequence of events, that the only thing a storyteller needs to do is get out of the way and let the facts speak. This is one of those stories. I have told it exactly as it happened, in the order it happened, without changing a single detail, because no detail I could invent would be better than what actually occurred on that Saturday morning in December. And because the ending, the part where everything came apart for the person who deserved to have everything come apart, was not something I planned or arranged or had any hand in beyond the small, careful, completely legal steps I took in the 48 hours that followed the event itself.
The event itself took about Four seconds. A silver SUV, moving too fast for a neighborhood street on a snowy morning, aimed, and I use that word with full intention, because what I saw with my own eyes was not an accident of inattention, but a deliberate choice, at the snowman my grandfather had spent 2 hours building in the front yard of my parents' house the previous afternoon, and demolished it without slowing down, without stopping, and without any visible acknowledgement that anything had occurred. Four seconds. The SUV came around the corner, tracked toward the snowman, hit it, kept moving, turned at the end of the street, and was gone. My grandfather was standing at the living room window when it happened.
He was 81 years old. He had built that snowman the day before with my two nieces, ages 6 and 4, who had helped him roll the base section, and who had contributed the carrot nose and the scarf from my nephew's costume box, and the two black buttons that served as eyes. He had taken photographs of himself with the snowman and texted them to me with a caption that said something is watching me and a string of emojis that an 81-year-old man texting emojis produces, which is to say slightly chaotic, but entirely charming. He was proud of the snowman. He had been thinking about building one since the first significant snow of the season arrived 3 days earlier, waiting for the right conditions.
And when the conditions were right, he had spent 2 hours in the cold making something that made his grandchildren laugh. He watched the SUV hit it and stood at the window for a moment after the SUV was gone. And then he sat down in the armchair by the window and did not say anything for several minutes. My mother called me 20 minutes later. My grandfather was fine, she said, meaning physically uninjured, meaning he had not been outside when it happened.
But she said he was quiet in a way that worried her, the particular quiet of a person who has absorbed something unkind and is sitting with the weight of it. She said she knew it was just a snowman. She said she was calling because she had seen the SUV before, had seen it in the neighborhood, and thought she knew whose it was. I drove to my parents' house within the hour. The snowman's remains were scattered across the front yard, the three sections of packed snow demolished and spread, the carrot still visible at the edge of the yard, the scarf caught on the low shrub at the corner of the front walk.
My grandfather was in the armchair. I sat with him for a while. We talked about other things. He did not bring up the snowman, and I did not, either. When I went into the kitchen to talk to my mother, she told me who she thought owned the silver SUV.
She said she was not certain. She said she had seen it parked in the driveway of the house on Clearwater Lane three streets over, the house belonging to a woman named Renata Kolb. I knew the name Renata Kolb. Everyone in the Millfield Commons community who had been there for more than 2 years knew the name Renata Kolb. She was the HOA president, and she had been the HOA president for 4 years, and the 4 years of her presidency had been the most exhaustively governed 4 years in the community's history.
She was not a bad person in every dimension. I want to be fair. I genuinely try to be fair, but she was a person who had found in the HOA presidency a platform for an authority that she exercised with a thoroughness and a certainty that left very little room for the ordinary human latitude that makes a neighborhood feel like a community rather than a compliance exercise. She sent violation notices for things that a reasonable person would not notice. She amended the guidelines regularly and with the particular energy of someone who is never quite satisfied with the current state of governance.
She appeared at community events with a clipboard and a camera and documented things. She was, in the vocabulary that anyone who has lived in a heavily managed HOA community will recognize immediately, that woman. She had sent my parents three violation notices in the 2 years since they had moved into Millfield Commons. The first was about the height of the ornamental grasses along the front walk, which were allegedly 2 inches over the permitted height for front yard ornamental plantings. The second was about a basketball hoop installed in the driveway, which was permitted under the guidelines, but which Renata claimed required prior written approval that had not been sought.
The third was about holiday lighting, specifically about the timing of when the holiday lights had been put up, which had been earlier than the permitted window by 4 days. My parents were reasonable, accommodating people who had addressed each notice without drama and without my involvement. I knew about them only because my mother mentioned them in the tone of mild exasperation that people use when they talk about small but persistent irritants. I had never had a direct interaction with Renata Kolb. I did not live in Millfield Commons.
I lived across town and visited my parents regularly. So, the HOA's governance was not something that touched my daily life. I knew about her the way you know about a weather pattern in a place you visit often. You are aware of it. You are prepared for it.