“We had a neighbor who lived across the street from us who was a real witch. After hearing the things she would yell at her terminally-ill husband or her adult son or any of her other relatives who had somehow been induced to stop by, it was pretty obvious to me that it wasn’t just her neighbors that she hated.
She had a three-car-wide garage with a correspondingly wide driveway, even though she only had one vehicle, this was after her husband had died. When it snowed, she expected whichever of her male relatives were currently at her beck-and-call to clear the entire width of the driveway. If it was just an inch or two of snow, a snow shovel would suffice. But once in a great while, we would get deep snow. At that point, random-male-relative would arrive with a snowblower.
In addition to the snowblower, he also brought an apparently genetic lack of respect for other people, because the direction in which he chose to blow the snow was not, as would seem logical, onto witch neighbor’s lawn, but instead into the street. Specifically, toward the end of our single-car driveway, which was a bit further down the street from her driveway, where it turned into a wide patch of ice.
Because the street had a bit of a slope upward in the direction we would need to drive to get off our street in the winter, that patch of ice made it nearly impossible for a car to get any traction after exiting our driveway. It wasn’t just a nuisance; it was a dangerous nuisance.
Despite my husband having had words with her and with random-male-relative about the situation, it kept happening. Finally, since I was pretty sure that this behavior wasn’t legal, the next time that the snowblower was used to cause this hazard, I called the police.
Sadly, according to the cop, moving snow onto the street turned out to be a perfectly legal thing to do. That news, which she overheard, seemed to please witch-neighbor quite a lot. Unfortunately for her, that fact was very useful to me.
When her random-male-relative was done with his dirty work and gone, and the sun had gone down, I went outside with a nice, quiet snow shovel. I removed the snow from the road in front of our driveway. In fact, I removed it from most of the street between our houses. But I was very careful about where I put it.
I put it, very legally, on the street in front of her driveway. From one side of her very wide driveway to the other, I built a ridge of snow about a foot high and a foot thick. I didn’t set foot on her property at all. The snow was all on the street, where the cop had very plainly said it was permissible to put it.
But once the twice-moved snow froze into a solid mass, there was no way she was going to get a vehicle out of her driveway. In fact, it took her quite some time the next day to get someone out to do the very difficult work of removing that ridge. No snow blowing was possible. The only bad part was that it was a Saturday because it would have been much nicer if she’d been late for work.
Interestingly, witch-neighbor never permitted her random-male-relatives to blow snow into the street after that.”
