Ezoic
I had no problem with this. I was perfectly happy to be the newer arrival who defers to local knowledge. I had no investment in being right about where the bins went on collection day or which way the traffic built up on school mornings. Denise knew the neighborhood. Fine.
The parking started about four months after we moved in.
It began, as these things often do, as something so minor and so brief that responding to it would have felt disproportionate. Denise would park outside our driveway for ten minutes in the morning, sometimes less. She was clearly popping somewhere nearby. Her car would be there when I came downstairs and gone by the time I needed to leave. I noticed it, but notice is not the same as inconvenience, and inconvenience is not always the same as a problem.
Then it became a problem.
I don’t know exactly when the shift happened. It wasn’t a single morning, it was a slow accumulation of mornings where the car was there slightly longer, where I needed to leave slightly earlier, where the car was gone from the driveway but I was already backing out and then had to stop and wait while Denise reversed it out of my way with the unhurried air of someone doing me a favor.
