PROPERTY VS. PEOPLE

To say I am not a big fan of property owner's associations would be a bit of an understatement. Oh, in theory they sound pretty good, don't they? Who wouldn't want to protect the value of their biggest investment? The thing is, in order to be really good at running one of these things, it is pretty much a given that you have to be someone who places the value of your property above what used to be the most valuable ingredient in any neighborhood - people being neighborly.

Having lived in the suburbs most of our marriage, we have had plenty of experience with these groups. I thought the one outside of Houston took the cake. Right after we closed on our house, we received a package in the mail. It was about the size and weight of a telephone book. As soon as I tore the wrapper off, I knew we were in trouble, for it contained about 500 pages worth of deed restrictions! Apparently, we weren't supposed to hang a birdhouse in our front yard, without first getting it approved by the association. Not only that, they wanted each and every house - of which there were hundreds, each looking so much like the next that we had trouble finding ours at first - to plant two oak trees out front. Guess they never heard about oak wilt, and the way it can travel from root to root, killing every tree for miles if there are too many, too close together.

Anyhoo, by the end of that first year, if you were to ask anyone on our block which house had the prettiest yard, I'm pretty sure they would have picked ours (at least, that's what they kept telling us!). I had finally completed the horticulture/landscape design program at Richland College just before we left Dallas, and had since landed a job at a very cool nursery with a generous employee discount, so I knocked myself out on this one. Why then, were we forever being written up by the P.O.A? Good question! It was right after John gave me that beautiful glass gazing ball and stand that we got our first warning notice. Turns out, we were only allowed to have a maximum of three "ornaments" in our yard, and since I had those two beautiful flower-filled pots on my porch, and a tiny angel-on-a-swing ornament hanging from a tree limb, this gazing ball put us over the limit. Soooo, we took it inside...for a few days. Then, upon our neighbors' advisement, we put it right back out again, until the next time the ornament nazi made her rounds. (What kind of person would choose to spend her days that way?)

You can imagine how relieved we were to leave all that behind, when we moved here to these four acres outside of Wimberley. Ok, now that you are picturing our glee, imagine how we felt when we attended our first annual neighborhood meeting here, expecting a friendly get-together and a chance to visit with all of our new neighbors, only to find ourselves in the middle of another P.O.A. - one that was gearing up to launch WWIII!