The lilac bushes along the south fence had been in the ground since my husband passed away in the spring of 2014, and I liked keeping them trimmed to a clean four feet so I could see the mail truck coming down Maple Street.

That quiet little view ended on a Tuesday afternoon when a faded blue moving truck with rusted wheel wells backed into the empty lot next door and crushed two of my border stones.

I watched from the kitchen window while a man with a shaved head and a gray hoodie unloaded three dented plastic crates and a stained mattress without bothering to use the sidewalk.

His wife, or whoever the woman with him was, stood by the passenger door smoking a cigarette and staring straight at my kitchen window as if I were the trespasser.

By Thursday morning, which was Day 3, my empty galvanized trash cans had been dragged six feet out of their alcove and left directly in front of my garage door so I had to get out of my sedan in slippers to move them myself before I could drive down to the hardware store for furnace filters.

I didn’t march over there and start banging on their aluminum screen door because at sixty-one years old you learn that most folks who start a fire are just waiting for you to fan it with your breath.

I just rolled the cans back to the concrete pad, swept up the stray bits of sawdust they had kicked over the property line, and told myself they were just stressed from the packing boxes.

Then came Day 5 with the white index card tucked neatly under the rubber flap of my mailbox.

The handwriting was neat and blocky, written with a fine-point black Sharpie that bled slightly through the cheap paper stock.

“Your dog barks too loud,” it said, with no signature at the bottom and no polite greeting at the top.

I stood there in the gravel drive holding that little square of paper for a solid minute while a blue jay squawked from the telephone wire overhead.

The thing was, I haven’t owned a dog since old Buster died of kidney failure twelve years ago, and the yard had been silent enough to hear the grass grow ever since.

I walked over to the shared hedge and looked across at their patch of crabgrass, but the windows were all shut tight and the only sound was the compressor of their refrigerator humming through the kitchen wall.

I didn’t drop the note in the trash because I have a yellow shoe box in the hall closet where I keep every utility bill and stray receipt going back to the Bush administration, and that index card belonged right beside the water bill from June.

Three days later the escalation arrived at precisely 6:00 AM.

I was standing at the stove waiting for my kettle to whistle when a heavy mechanical hissing sound started up just outside the kitchen window.

A high-pressure arc of cold municipal water hit the driver side door of my sedan with a wet thud, then swept across the wooden porch boards, soaking the welcome mat my sister stitched for me in O’Neill.

I pulled back the sheer curtain and saw they had jammed a cheap plastic impulse sprinkler right on the edge of the dividing line, angled so it caught my property square while leaving their own dirt driveway bone dry.

I poured my coffee, waited for the cycle to finish, and walked out onto the damp concrete with my house slippers getting soaked through the soles.

I knocked on their front door three times, nice and steady, the way you do when you want someone to know you are not yelling yet but you are also not going away.

A woman with bleached hair pulled up into a messy clip opened the door about four inches, keeping the chain lock stretched tight across the frame like a metal grin.

She didn’t look sleepy even though it was barely past six-thirty in the morning, and she smelled faintly of cheap menthol and stale pancake batter.

“Can I help you with something?” she asked, her voice flat and thin through the gap.

“That sprinkler you put in,” I said, keeping my chin level and my hands in the pockets of my cardigan so she wouldn’t see my fingers twitching. “It’s hitting my car every morning now. The mineral spots are going to ruin the clear coat.”

She blinked twice, her eyes small and hard behind silver-rimmed glasses that looked too modern for her face.

“Oh, oops,” she said, and there was not an ounce of sorry in the way the word dropped off her tongue. “We thought this was our yard. The property line markers are all crooked anyway.”

“The iron stake is six inches inside my hostas,” I told her, and my voice had that dry, quiet snap to it that usually made the cashiers at the feed store pay attention. “Move the sprinkler back by your porch, please.”

She didn’t nod, and she didn’t apologize a second time.

“We’ll see,” she said, and then she clicked the heavy wooden door shut in my face before I could even take a breath to finish the sentence.

That afternoon I drove down to the True Value on Main Street and bought the exact same model of green-spiked lawn sprinkler, along with fifty feet of heavy-duty black rubber hose that wouldn’t kink when the sun hit it.

I hooked it up to the outdoor spigot by the meter, walked it across the flower bed, and planted the metal spike three feet inside their mulch bed right beneath their front window.

I adjusted the little brass screw until the water arc sent a steady, rhythmic stream right against theirWELCOME mat with a satisfying hollow slap every twelve seconds.

The next morning at six, the war began in earnest.

Her sprinkler hit my car with enough force to rattle the side mirror, and mine answered back by hammering their front screen until the metal mesh rang like a tin drum.

We stood out there in our respective yards for about twenty seconds, her in a faded floral bathrobe and me in my beige cardigan, neither of us looking at the other, just listening to the two little plastic heads click back and forth across the gravel.

It was ridiculous and petty, and part of me felt seventy years old acting like a twelve-year-old boy with a water pistol, but another part of me was just so tired of being pushed off my own dirt that I didn’t care.

We kept up that little dance for four days straight, morning and evening, until the water pressure dropped every time the town tower refilled at six p.m.

The neighbors across the street stopped walking their poodles on our side of the block, and the mailman started leaving the letters on the top step instead of walking up the flagstones.

Then came yesterday afternoon when the doorbell rang right in the middle of my favorite mystery program on public television.

It wasn’t the mailman and it wasn’t the UPS driver with another box of canned peaches.

It was Brenda Vance, who lives four blocks down and has served as our neighborhood association president since the subdivision was paved back when Reagan was in office.

Brenda was holding a clipboard against her chest like a shield and wearing her church-committee sweater with the pearl buttons down the front, looking very official and very annoyed.

I opened the screen door just enough to let the breeze through, but she didn’t wait for me to offer her a glass of iced tea the way folks usually did.

“Martha,” she said, and her voice had that sharp little quiver that meant she had already heard one side of the story and didn’t plan on listening to the other. “I just came from the Hendersons’ place.”

“That what they’re calling themselves this week?” I asked, leaning against the door frame with my arms crossed over my chest.

Brenda gave a little huff through her nose, adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses down her narrow nose until she could look at me over the top of them.

“They are very upset, Martha. They said you’ve been harassing them ever since they moved in, spraying water at their front door every single morning and making the place unlivable.”

“They started it with my trash cans on Day 3,” I said, and I didn’t raise my voice an inch because shouting at Brenda Vance was like arguing with a church pew. “And then they left a note in my box complaining about a dog I haven’t owned since 2012.”

Brenda tapped her clipboard with a pink fingernail that had a little gold star sticker near the cuticle.

“That’s neither here nor there now,” she said, using that tone she always used when she wanted the bake sale committee to drop a complaint about the dry brownies. “They’re new to the neighborhood, and they’ve got a lot on their plate. The husband is looking for work down at the grain elevator, and she’s got her mother staying with them in that tiny front bedroom.”

“They’re soaking my car every day at six in the morning, Brenda. Look at the side panel right now. It’s covered in lime crust.”

Brenda sighed, a long, dramatic sound that ruffled the little fringe of hair around her forehead.

“Look, Martha. They’re asking for a fresh start. They just want you to be the bigger person and turn your sprinkler off once and for all. If you do that, I’m sure they’ll move theirs.”

I looked past Brenda’s shoulder toward the empty street, then down at the yellow shoe box sitting on the hall table just behind my left hip where the index card was tucked safely away.

“Did she tell you about the note, Brenda?” I asked softly.

Brenda frowned, her pencil hovering over the clip. “What note?”

“The one about the barking dog,” I said, stepping back just enough so the screen door clicked into its latch. “The one they left in my box on Day 5, before the sprinklers ever started.”

Brenda blinked once, her mouth parting just a fraction as she tried to calculate the timeline.

“Well,” she muttered, looking down at her clipboard as if the answer might be written in the margins. “People make mistakes when they’re stressed from moving. You know how it is.”

“I do know how it is,” I told her, and I reached out to push the screen door closed until the latch caught with a clean, dry snap. “Tell them I’ll turn mine off as soon as they bring my trash cans back to where they found them.”

Brenda stood on the porch for three whole seconds, her mouth opening to say something about Christian charity or neighborly grace, but then she looked at the wet patch on my gravel drive and thought better of it.

She turned her back without another word, her sensible walking shoes crunching loudly against the limestone gravel as she made her way down the walk.

I watched her through the front window until she turned the corner by the lilac hedge, then I walked back to the kitchen and poured myself another cup of lukewarm coffee from the pot.

The house was quiet again, except for the faint, steady drip of the garden hose out by the side spigot where the afternoon sun was just beginning to dry the last of the puddles.