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“It’s a free country!”
Our neighborhood was a flat block dissected by an alley. The alley abutted all the back yards. The house behind ours, across the alley, where 3 boys lived was our baseball diamond. Home plate was under their kitchen window and we’d hit (or kick, depending on the game) toward the alley. Our next-door neighbor had a wide-open beautiful grassy lawn cared for by Ellen, 85, and her daughter Mary, 65. All our yards kind of ran together, though they had definite boundary markers, usually flowers of some sort, but we could see all the neighbors’ yards. Mom would say, “Have you seen Mrs. Hagenbuch’s lilies this morning?” Or we’d carry on about Pinkie’s lilacs, or Mary’s peonies. Mrs. Martin, where the baseball diamond was, didn’t have flowers. She had dirt and bases and a yard full of kids.
The problem for us kids was that “Old Lady Ellen”, who wore black high-top Converse sneakers and long dresses, charged out of her house, down the porch steps, and ran into her yard to snag the baseball faster than any of our youthful outfielders. And she wouldn’t give it back. She put it in her apron pocket and said she’d give it to the PO-lice.
My brother was so mad. We could look out our dining room window and see all our baseballs lined up on her window sill. My seven-year-old brother Danny pleaded with daddy to go get them. They belonged to all us kids; it wasn’t fair, blah, blah, blah. It fell on deaf ears. Then Danny exploded with “It’s a free country!”
Daddy said, “So it is. And Ellen is free to own that yard next door. And she is free to decide who walks on it.”
“Well, we should be free to go get our balls. She won’t even let us touch one little piece of grass! It’s not fair.”
“Yes, it is,” Daddy said. “It’s her land. She gets to decide.”
Mom said, “It would be a shame if she felt she had to put up a fence to keep you out. It wouldn’t be near as pretty. Don’t make her do that.”
“It’ll come to that, too, if you kids don’t respect her borders. You don’t go past that spirea bush and the burn barrel.” Dad planted the spirea bush with his finger on the table.
“She said we’re breaking the law just being on her property,” Danny pouted. “It’s a free country.”
“She’s right,” Dad said. “You don’t have permission to be there, you’ve been told several times to stay off her grass. You’re violating her rights; that’s her free country.”
“Well, I got rights, too,” Danny said. “And I let anybody go on my yard.”
“This isn’t your yard. It belongs to your mother and me. And if someone came on looking for mischief, we could order them off, and call the police. I think we’re through talking about this. If you don’t want to lose your balls, keep them out of Ellen’s yard. You are not to go in it again. That’s the law. Understood?” He glared at Danny.
There’s this particular way siblings have of rolling their eyes at one another when, for a change, they find themselves on the same side. Danny rolled his at me and I knew I’d just become the designated ball snatcher. I was a pretty fast runner. I gathered my indignation and entered the argument. I should have known better.
“Well, I don’t think it’s very Christian to keep people out of your yard,” I said.
My dad turned on me fast as anything. “Ain’t got nothing to do with Ellen being Christian or not, doesn’t matter, it’s not your business. It’s got nothin’ to do with this.”
“Well,” I started.
“Stop right there,” my dad said. “What a person does in her house is her business. What she does with her yard is her business. That’s her freedom. You can walk past her house on the sidewalk that belongs to everybody, and you can run down the alley behind her property; that belongs to the township, that’s your freedom. And it ends right there. It’s got nothing to do with anything else. You cross her lot line you’re breaking the law. She’s called the cops before and she’ll do it again. That’s her freedom. She has every right to do what she does. You choose to go where you don’t belong, you pay the penalty, and you lose the ball. We’re through talkin’.”
My brother stormed out of the kitchen mumbling, “Some free country!”
And that, boys and girls, was my Civics-in-Action lesson that Saturday morning when I was ten.