The HOA Banned Children's Chalk And Then Discovered The Local Newspaper

The chalk was a hopscotch. Nine squares. Drawn by a six-year-old called Priya who lives at number 30 and who is, by any measure, the best thing about our street.

The complaint was filed by a man whose name everybody in this story knows and whom I will call R.

Rule 14(c) prohibits "temporary surface markings" on shared paths. It was written to stop a man in 2011 who kept spray-painting arrows to his garage.

R turned up at seven on a Saturday with a pressure washer.

He washed off the hopscotch. He also, and I am not exaggerating for effect, washed the front three feet of the path outside number 30 so thoroughly that it is now a different colour from the rest of the path, which means his enforcement is more permanent than the violation was.

Priya cried. Her father came out. There was a conversation that I could hear from my kitchen, and I want to record that Priya's father was extraordinarily calm, and that R was not.

Then R sent the family a notice of violation and a bill for the pressure washing.

Here is where our street stopped being a street and became an organism.

Somebody — and I genuinely do not know who, and I have decided not to find out — rang the local paper.

The photograph they printed is of Priya, holding a piece of chalk, standing on a clean grey square of path, looking at the camera with an expression that has since been described by three separate people as "devastating".

The headline was: HOA BANS HOPSCOTCH.

It ran on a Tuesday. By Thursday the board had voted to "clarify" 14(c) to exclude "children's water-soluble play markings". By the following month R had resigned, sold, and gone, and I am told he lives somewhere with no pavements at all, which feels like justice arranged by a poet.

The hopscotch is back. It is redrawn about twice a week. Sometimes there are two.

And once, in the spring, I came out and found that somebody had drawn a small, careful hopscotch directly in front of the clubhouse.

Nobody has ever washed it off.