*Author's note: I recently met a female veterinarian I took to be around 40 who was not just polite but actually 'sweet' in the best possible way. I also found her very attractive, so the vet in this story 'looks' just like the one I met—short, petite, great smile, and as friendly as could be.
I also have a good friend who's a single mom who lives in a development governed by an HOA. Two years ago she was forced to resod her front yard then a year later was told she couldn't have a basketball backboard attached to her house even though it was for her son's use.
This story folds both events into the lead female character. I hope you enjoy it.
*****
As she pulled into the driveway after a trip to the grocery store following another long, exhausting day at work, Valerie Eimann realized she hadn't heard a word her 9-year old son, Jayden, had said during the ride home. Her entire focus was on her financial situation, and she was finally at the point where she would be debt-free again after this upcoming payday. Except, of course, for the mortgage on her home and her car payment, but she didn't consider that debt the way she did things like credit cards or a signature loan from the bank.
Valerie was a veterinarian with a practice in the town of Green Cove Springs, Florida, which was located about 35 miles south of Jacksonville. She was a solo practitioner who had been slowly building her business since moving there from Jacksonville five years earlier to avoid having to send Jayden to school in the Duval County district where the big city was located. She'd heard too many stories about schools being 'war zones', and there was no way she was sending her son to war.
She'd slowly tunneled her way out of the pile of bills that had accumulated beginning with a trip to the ER after Jayden fractured his elbow when he ran over something and fell off his bike when he was six years old. He hit his left arm hard on the pavement and the elbow took the brunt of the fall, sustaining fractures to the humorous and the ulna.
If that wasn't bad enough, she'd been involved in a fender bender six weeks later that cost a $1,000 to get repaired even with collision coverage. She'd chosen a higher deductible to save money, and until this one claim wiped out the last five years of savings, she'd thought it was a great idea.
But the worst of the worst came two years ago when her Homeowners Association began sending letters informing her the grass in her yard had a 'ratio of grass-to-weeds' it considered unacceptable. She ignored them until a letter came via registered mail in which she learned she was been fined for 'failure to maintain HOA standards'.
The letter cited some obscure paragraph in the HOA's Covenants and Restrictions document, something she'd never even seen let alone read. It further informed her she would be fined each month until she corrected the situation, and adding insult to injury, the fines would be used in the form of a lien against her property. That meant she couldn't even sell her home until the fines, with interest, were paid in full.
Panicked, she'd contacted a local landscaping company to come out and dig up her yard, which really was in bad shape, remove the tilled-up mess, then resod it. Since only the front yard was visible, the HOA had 'graciously' let her get by with only resodding that portion of her lawn. Even so, it had cost her just over $3,200 to have them do all of the work.
Had she had the time to do it herself, she could have bought a rear-drive rototiller and turned the yard over for about $500. She'd have also had to rent a dumpster to haul away the tilled-up soil, but that would have only run about $150. The sod itself was $200 a pallet so for another $800, she'd have been done with it. And $1,450 was still a lot of money, it was a whole lot better than $3,200.
But being a single mother with a full-time job, doing it herself wasn't an option. The yard work would have been hard, but at 43, she was still in very good shape thanks to a lifetime of running and bicycling. As of late, however, those were things she'd been unable to do very often because she was working all the extra hours she could in order to get out of debt. Once she made a final payment on her credit card in another week, she would finally be free and clear and able to go back to 'only' working 40 hours a week.
Financially, her practice was doing reasonably well, but never well enough to put much money away, so she was working late and making house calls on the weekend to make enough extra income to pay off these unexpected expenses.
"Jayden? Will you please get the mail for us?" she said as she stopped the car in the driveway while the garage door went up.
"You weren't even listening, were you, Mom?" her son said as he hopped out and walked back to the mailbox.
Valerie hadn't been listening, and it hurt her to have her son point it out, but at nine, he was way too young to understand the kind of pressure money could place on a family, especially after having been abandoned by his father who, three years ago, suddenly decided he 'needed his freedom'. He'd been a big-time beer drinker for as long as she could remember, and a part of her was relieved when he left.
He paid child support, but it came on a very hit-or-miss basis. Valerie's only choice was to deal with it or go to the police and have her son's father put in jail. That, in turn, would only cause him to blame his mother, because she knew her 'ex' would badmouth her to no end in his smooth-talking, convincing way.
In spite of all of that, Valerie really loved her subdivision, and she especially loved the location of her home. She had the very last lot in the development, and her property was bordered by trees to the north and the west, and there were woods and a manmade lake in front of the house. She had neighbors on her east side, but they were a quiet, older couple she rarely saw and never heard. There was also a river less than 50 yards from her house through the woods to her north, and that meant no one would ever be able to build on that side of her.
One of her biggest joys was putting corn outside the master bedroom window each morning which attracted deer, geese, turkeys, ducks, and squirrels. She loved sitting in her recliner and watching them as she sipped a cup of coffee before getting ready to go to work.
During those times, the world around her was silent except for the quiet pecking sounds until the geese arrive. Even then, things were fine until another group arrived, and that's when the noise began in earnest. 'Clan' members postured and hissed at the other to establish dominance to see who'd eat first. It unfailingly made her laugh when they would stop hissing and lower their long necks and charge a goose from another group. And then a third group would come in and let the first group have it as the second group stood around watching while the deer and turkeys pecked away, oblivious to the battle. All the while, a dozen or so squirrels stuffed their cheeks then ran up a tree to do whatever squirrels did.
Life was easy and simple at those moments, and she wished with all her heart they could last forever. But the old-fashioned ticking clock hanging on the wall in front of her reminded her each and every day that time really did stand still for no one. So once her coffee cup was empty, Valerie would get up, shower, and get ready for work before getting her son up for school.
They would eat breakfast together, hurry out of the house and head to school where she would drop him off then head to work, and grind out another day in order to pay the bills so she could continue living there and do it all over again the following day.
As Jayden got the mail, his mom pulled into the garage and shut off the engine. She grabbed her purse then got out only to have Jayden hand her a huge stack of...stuff...90% of which was junk she would toss as soon as she got to the kitchen trash can.
However, it was the 10% that scared her, and when she saw a letter from the HOA, her heart sank.
"What now?" she wondered as she threw all of the 'circulars' and 'shoppers' and...stuff...into the garbage.
She slid a nail under the back flap then held her breath.
"You've got to be kidding!" she said out loud.
"What's wrong, Mom?" Jayden asked, already over her having not listened to him on the ride home.
He had his basketball in hand, and Valerie thought she might start crying when she read the letter.
"Honey? I am so sorry, but we have to take down the basketball hoop your father put up for you."
"Why?" he said, instantly on the verge of crying.
That started shortly after his father moved out after making all kinds of promises about how he'd be there for his son, and that they'd do stuff together all the time. Because he'd never done that even when he lived at home, Valerie knew it was all empty promises, but she refused to tell the truth about her husband while he routinely lied about her.
