We attended our first HOA meeting tonight. We don’t live in a condo, and we’re not a gated community, so it seems weird to me to even have an HOA, but we do, and they were meeting, so we went.

When we lived in our townhouse in San Jose, there were only six homeowners, so we were all on the board, and we had perfunctory meetins every month that amounted to, “The gardeners suck, let’s yell at them, stop parking in the fire lane, who wants to be president next?”

The meeting we went to last was nothing like those informat meetings in California. It was, in fact, much more like the Town Meetings on The Gilmore Girls, full of eccentric characters who bickered with each other, but since our ‘neighborhood’ consists of between 2300 and 2400 homes, I guess that makes sense.

I haven’t observed the characters, or their bickering, enough to adequately describe them, and the meeting room at the library had the a/c set to “arctic,” so what energy I was expending was used for maintaining the minimum body temperature needed to survive, and not really on paying attention, but much of it amused me.

These people need help, but I don’t really want to volunteer for anything that requires being on a committee – because after seeing the sizes of soft drinks here in Texas, I’m terrified that the “camels” these people create would be big enough that one bowel movement would obliterate a city block.

(The reference here is, for the two people who don’t get it, to the notion that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.)

I volunteered to write for the newsletter.
I said ‘yay’ and ‘aye’ and ‘nay’ when appropriate.

But mostly I sat there shivering and thinking, “This would be more fun with coffee, and a better script.”

A writing challenge courtesy of Tales from the Ridge: 250 words with the title “Jackson’s Rock”

Their relationship still felt new, the first time he took her to the woods. She loved him, and could see he loved the cabin like an old friend, so she didn’t complain about the lack of water pressure, the mouse droppings in the back of the pantry, or the miss-matched sheets. She simply took half an antihistamine, and began cleaning while he went to light a fire, and turn on the boiler for hot water.

She asked if they could go for a walk before it got dark. (Before the mosquitoes came out in force, to eat her alive.)

He grinned and said that would be a lovely idea. (She liked that he could use the word ‘lovely’ and not lose an ounce of masculinity.) He made her change into clunky hiking boots, and then took her by the hand.

They wandered toward the creek, a merrily burbling stream of water, with a beach just big enough for two chairs and a cooler. At the end of the beach was a smooth expanse of sun-bathed rock that jutted out into the center of the creek.

He told her as a kid he’d spent hours there, with books and the neighbor’s old retriever for company and that he was always yelled at for not wearing sunscreen, and coming home sunburned, but happy.

They stood on the rock, and kissed in the sunshine, and then he asked her a whispered question, and slipped the ring onto her finger when she answered yes.