My Neighbor Parked In My Driveway For Six Months Until 30 Cars Blocked Hers

For six months, my neighbor Linda treated my driveway like it belonged to her.

And for six months, I let her tell me that an empty space wasn’t really mine, until the morning thirty classic cars taught her otherwise.

It started innocently, the way these things always do.

“Just ten minutes,” she’d say, leaving her enormous black SUV in my driveway while she popped across the street to visit the Hendersons. “You don’t mind, do you, Carol?”

I didn’t mind. Not at first. Ten minutes is nothing. You’d have to be a genuinely unpleasant person to begrudge a neighbor ten minutes.

But ten minutes stretched into two hours. Two hours became an afternoon. And before long she was leaving that SUV parked squarely in my driveway overnight, so that when I opened my

curtains in the morning the first thing I saw was her chrome grille sitting where Robert’s Pontiac used to be.

I asked her to stop. Politely, the first several times.

Then firmly.

I even bought a sign at the hardware store, a real one, metal, PRIVATE DRIVEWAY in bold white letters on a red background, and I mounted it on a post at the foot of the drive where no

reasonable person could miss it.

Linda laughed when she saw it.

“You barely use the thing anyway,” she said.

And she was right about one thing, which was the maddening part. Since my husband, Robert, died two years earlier, I only had the one car, a sensible sedan that fit comfortably in the garage.

The driveway did sit empty most of the time now. But an empty driveway is still a driveway, and a thing you own does not stop being yours simply because you are not using every square foot

of it every hour of the day. I owned that property. I paid the mortgage on it for thirty years, and I still paid the property taxes on every inch of it, including the part Linda had decided was surplus.

To understand why that empty driveway mattered so much to me, and why it wasn’t nearly as empty as Linda thought, you have to understand what it used to be.

Before Robert died, our driveway was rarely empty at all. My husband loved classic cars. Not in the casual, “oh, that’s a nice Mustang” sort of way that most people love cars. He loved them the

way some people love music or scripture. He could hear an engine idling from half a block away and tell you exactly what was wrong with it, whether it was a timing issue or a bad lifter or just

somebody who hadn’t changed their oil since the previous administration.

For more than twenty years he belonged to the local classic-car club, and over time our house

became one of the group’s favorite gathering places. There was always somebody in our driveway on a Saturday with the hood of something propped open, and Robert leaning over the

engine bay with a cup of coffee going cold on the fender, deep in a conversation I couldn’t follow a word of and loved listening to anyway.