You can grow tomatoes, but not that other stuff

Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist

Maude McDaniel and I are old friends, even though the last time we met I didn’t recognize her. Now, we’re running a new photo with her column, although if you missed it last week, you’ll have to wait until next Sunday to see it again.

I rarely see Maude in person because she e-mails her columns to me every other week, and that usually initiates an e-mail conversation. We often lament that we’ve wasted some of our best stuff in e-mails instead of our columns.

Maude sent me next Sunday’s installment last week because she’s going away to spend time with friends at an elderhostel (which I told her was far preferable to an elderhostile).

She and I agreed that in our case, at least, the commercials about the old mops that have been thrown out in favor of some new scrubbing contraption wouldn’t apply to us. Neither of us could see the sense in dirtying a clean mop when there was a perfectly good used mop handy.

Maude said she and her elderhostel friends have kept in touch by “round robin” letter for some time, and we decided that a round robin is a well-fed robin ... meaning he got there in time to get the worm.

On the other hand, as everyone should know by now, it’s the second mouse who gets the cheese.

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After spending 30 years in a rented apartment that didn’t have one, I now live in a house that has a wonderful back porch. I enjoy sitting on it in the evenings and have no intention of walling it up to make another room. My house has enough rooms, as it is.

If I ever did decide to make another room, I live in Keyser and probably wouldn’t have as much difficulty with the project as the lady who enclosed her porch here in Cumberland. The city has ordered her to undo $16,000 worth of work because it is in violation of city zoning ordinances. How it got to be that way will be for a judge or jury to decide.

This is an example of why people in Mineral County (where I live) and elsewhere fight like devils from hell every time someone proposes to impose zoning upon them. They feel they should be able to do what they wish with their property, so long as it is otherwise legal.

That is to say, my dad was allowed to grow tomatoes in his back yard, but the authorities would not have favored his raising a marijuana crop.

This is not to say that that all zoning is a bad thing. Nobody — most folks, anyway — wants a strip club and its patrons for neighbors, and when I lived in LaVale, the people next door raised chickens — among them a rooster who thought the sun rose at 3 a.m.

While I lived in Cumberland, I got to see numerous examples of what happens to people who want to do things with their property.

One of my neighbors enclosed a small back porch to make a playroom for his small daughter and her friends. So far as I recall, he jumped through all of the permit hoops and had no trouble in that respect.

However, when his first revised property tax bill arrived, so did reality.

“I walled in my porch to make a playroom for my daughter,” he said. “I didn’t build a brand-new (expletive deleted) mansion! You can’t even see the (expletive deleted) unless you go around the house and stand in my back yard!”

Another of my neighbors decided to put a deck on the side of his house. Again, he successfully negotiated the permit minefield. However, some of life’s little inconveniences intervened, and he didn’t start work on the deck for some months — maybe even a year, I don’t remember.

But begin building it, he eventually did. He was almost finished when someone from the city saw what was going on, decided the original permit had expired and filed the necessary report. Subsequently, my friend was ordered to stop what he was doing and remove the deck.

My recollection is that it took him over a year to get the mess straightened out and finish the deck.

Another friend replaced the rotting wooden windows in his place of business with aluminum windows that so closely resembled the originals you could stand across the street and not tell the difference.

The problem was, his building was in a historic preservation district, although it was — at least, in my opinion and his — not itself historic because it was built in the 1930s.

Someone from the city passed closely enough to see the windows were not historically correct, and (as Jimmy Hatlo used to say) That’s When The Fun Began.

Other friends of mine persevered and got permission to demolish and replace a dilapidated and ancient — but allegedly historic — brick building. Then they discovered that they had to salvage and re-use a certain percentage of the old bricks in their new building.

But it could always be worse. The Associated Press reported recently that villagers in Romania got tired of waiting for the authorities to replace a bridge that a flood swept away last July, so they built their own bridge.

That’s when the government began paying attention to them, and now a hunt has begun to identify the people who worked on the bridge.

You see, they didn’t go through the permit process and are subject to prosecution, fines and imprisonment. (AP didn’t say if they would have been required to use any of the components of the old bridge — assuming they could have been found — in the new one.)

Fortunately, a sense of mercy can be found even in Romania. The prosecutor in this case said he’ll forgive the villagers if it’s determined they acted out of necessity.

How did it happen? Come on. You know.

Someone had to say, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”