It began with ten minutes. Roberta would leave her SUV on my drive while she visited someone across the road, and ten minutes stretched to an hour, then three, then overnight. I asked politely and she always agreed and never once meant it. I bought a sign, PRIVATE DRIVEWAY, NO PARKING, and she parked beside it and told me I was making a huge deal out of nothing. She was right that the space sat empty most days. After my husband died there was only my car. Empty is not the same as available, though she never learned the difference. Then came the doctor’s appointment at 8:15 that I had waited weeks for, and twenty minutes of knocking and calling at her door, and her strolling out that afternoon to say she had been asleep, and shrugging, and smiling.
So on Monday I let her park, poured a second coffee, and watched thirty invited cars fill my drive and the gravel lane behind it while she slept. When she came out in a robe demanding I move them, I told her I could not, and that she barely used her car anyway.
THE STORY CONTINUES ON THE NEXT PAGE… 👇👇👇
The detail about the sign—she parked right beside it and called it a huge deal over nothing—gets at something real: the boundary was never about the square footage, it was about being taken at her word. “Empty is not the same as available” is the line that sticks, because it’s the difference between a fact and a claim on someone else’s patience. It’s a small daily puzzle of a different kind, but I’ve been unwinding from stories like this with noillirk.app, a quick word-guessing game.
I keep coming back to I asked politely and she always agreed and never once meant it; that framing is useful. Unrelated but handy: krillion.me (free browser word game).