The HOA Voted To Ban My Wheelchair Ramp As "Non-Traditional"

The one vote against was a retired postwoman named Dot, who is eighty-one and who, at the meeting, said only this: "You are all going to be old."

The ramp is wooden. It is stained the same colour as the deck it attaches to. It has a handrail because my father is seventy-four and has one leg and is stubborn, and I would rather he had a rail than a fall.

It was built by a licensed contractor to code, with a permit, and the permit is on file with the city, and I brought the permit to the meeting in a plastic sleeve like a man who has learned that paper is a weapon.

The board said the issue was not the permit. The issue was that the ramp was "non-traditional" for the "streetscape".

I asked what tradition, exactly. The neighbourhood was built in 1998.

The president said, and this is verbatim, because I recorded it, which is legal in my state and which I recommend to everybody: "We have standards, and they don't change because of one family's circumstances."

I published that sentence.

I published it with the permit, the photograph of the ramp, my father's name — with his permission, and he was delighted, he is a vain old man and he loved every second of this — and a very short, very calm letter to the board explaining what the Fair Housing Act is.

It took eleven days.

They rescinded the vote "pending further review". The president stopped being president in September. Dot, who is eighty-one, is now on the board, and she runs the meetings like a woman who has been waiting forty years for the microphone.

My father goes up his ramp every day. He waves at people. He has become, in a way I did not see coming, a kind of local landmark.

And in October, another family two streets over built one, and nobody said a word about tradition, and the contractor told me they had "seen the ramp on the news" and thought, well, if he can.

That is the only trophy I got and I would not trade it.