There are other people who will tell you that neighbor conflicts are the ones most worth avoiding, because you cannot choose your neighbors the way you choose your friends, and you have to see them every day, and the cost of a bad relationship with the person next door is paid in small, daily increments for as long as you both live there.
Both of these pieces of advice are correct.
This story is about what happens when you hold both of them at the same time and find the narrow path between them — the one that requires you to be smarter than you want to be when someone has hurt your children and your instinct is to stand on your deck and say every true thing you know about them at full volume.
It is also, at its heart, a story about an apple tree.
And what it means to know the difference between what is technically yours and what is actually right.
Dale Mercer moved in next door eleven years ago.
I know this because we moved in twelve years ago, which means I was still in the honeymoon phase of the house — the phase where everything about the neighborhood feels like possibility, where you learn which neighbors wave back and which ones don’t, where you figure out the unspoken rules of how your particular street works.
Dale was already there when we arrived. He had been there for years, apparently. He knew the drainage pattern of the block and where the property lines technically fell and which utility company owned which pole. He was the kind of neighbor who possessed a great deal of technical information about shared spaces and was not shy about deploying it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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