I want to be clear about that, because everything else in this story got argued over, reinterpreted, and printed in a newsletter, and I do not want this part to be misunderstood. The tank did not move. It was not screened into invisibility, it was not replaced, it was not dressed up to look like something it was not. It stood behind the arborvitae on my own land, large and white, the way it had stood for nine years, and it stayed there by right: under the 1988 agreement recorded at Book 412, Page 117, which predated the subdivision plat and ran with the land, and on a parcel that had never been annexed into the HOA. The removal order had been withdrawn. There was nothing left to comply with.
And then, a few weeks after the hearing, I planted a second row of arborvitae anyway.
I did it on a Saturday morning, with a borrowed auger and a truckload of young trees from the nursery outside town. I dug the holes myself, set the root balls level, backfilled, watered, and tamped the soil down with my boots. It was ordinary, satisfying work, the kind that leaves dirt under your nails and a straight line behind you when you step back to look. Ruth Henderson came out to her porch while I was working and watched for a while. Sam Ortiz stopped his car on his way past and rolled the window down.
"Making it prettier for the board?" he called out, and then winced at his own joke.
"No," I said. "Making it a little less in the way for the neighbors who have to look at it. There is a difference."
That distinction mattered to me, and I said it out loud more than once that day, because I knew how easily a voluntary act gets rewritten into a concession. I was not planting the second row because the HOA had told me to. The HOA's order was gone. I was planting it because I lived next to these people, and because a screen of green is a decent thing to offer when you can offer it without giving up anything that matters. A neighbor plants a tree. A man under an order plants a compliance measure. The trees were the same. The reason was not.
By evening the row stood in a neat line behind the first, still thin and young, still years away from doing the job the older trees did. That was fine. I had never been in a hurry about the tank, and I was not in a hurry about the trees either. I washed my hands, and the grease stayed, and the dirt joined it, and I stood at the fence and looked at the tank through the new row and the old one. It was still there. It was still white. It was still mine, and it still did the work it had always done. The only thing that had changed was that I had chosen, freely, to soften its edges a little. That choice belonged to me, and I intended to keep it that way.
Ruth Henderson came out again as I worked, carrying a glass of water that I had not asked for and setting it on a flat stone by the path, the way she did when I fixed things at her house. "You do not have to do this, you know," she said, looking at the line of young trees.
"I know," I said. "That is why I am doing it."
She nodded, as if that answer made complete sense to her, which it did. She stayed a while, watching me tamp soil and straighten a tree that leaned a fraction to the left, and then she said, "The first row was here when I moved in, more or less. Your second row will outlast us both, probably."
"Probably," I said. "Trees are patient that way."
A truck went past on the street, slow, and the driver lifted a hand. I lifted mine back, dirt and all. By mid-afternoon the row was finished, and I stood back with Ruth at the edge of the drive and looked at it: thin, green, unremarkable, and exactly right. It did not hide the tank. It softened it. It said, without saying anything, that the man who owned the tank also lived among the people who looked at it, and that he had thought about them while he was digging.
I told Ruth that, in fewer words, and she said, "That is a neighborly thing, Nolan. Not a compliant thing. There is a difference, and people here will know it, even if they do not say it out loud." She was right, and I was glad she had said it, because I wanted the distinction to live somewhere besides my own head. It lived now in her front room, in Sam's driveway, and in the row of trees itself, which would grow whether or not anyone remembered why it had been planted.