I was bagging up the rotting yard waste my brother-in-law had dumped in my garden when my shovel hit something buried underneath. I pulled it out, and suddenly, dumping it all back over his fence didn’t seem like nearly enough.
The pile of rotting grass against my back door was bad enough.
What made me stop was the plastic tag buried underneath it.
For four months, my brother-in-law Gary had been dumping yard waste over the fence into my garden. I thought I already understood why.
Gary lived directly behind my wife, Susan, and me, our backyards separated by a wooden fence barely five feet tall.
A narrow gate at the far end of the fence opened into the alley that ran behind both houses.
The dumping had started small.
A few grass clippings after he mowed.
Then hedge trimmings.
At first, I blamed the wind. That excuse disappeared the morning I found an entire garbage bag’s worth of leaves dumped directly onto my tomato plants.
I mentioned it at a family dinner.
Gary laughed.
“It’s basically the same yard anyway.”
“It really isn’t.”
Susan gave me the look she used whenever she wanted both of us to stop before dinner became a family summit.
So I let it go.
Then it happened again.
And again.
Over the next several weeks, I asked Gary three separate times to stop dumping things into my garden.
“Yeah, my bad.”
Then Saturday arrived, and another pile appeared.
Gary had always been like that.
Boundaries became suggestions once they inconvenienced him.
Susan called it “Gary being Gary.”
Last weekend, I stepped outside and smelled the problem before I saw it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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