He waved his skimmer at me and said, garden still dead, Sherlock. So I said it was, and I had kept the receipts, and I told him the code officer had two months of my documentation and was coming out Wednesday to inspect the discharge path.
Because I had not taken it further with him, I took it to my phone. Every drain, the date, the hose pointed my way, the dead plants after, plus a photo of the chlorine reading in the runoff. Two months. And there are actual rules about discharging pool water onto adjacent property.
For two months the only thing I had lacked was proof of the source and the chlorine, and the moment I had two months of dated drains, a hose aimed at my garden, and a chlorine reading in the runoff, the man making a federal case out of pool water became a documented discharge case with an inspection booked.
He threw the good Fourth of July party and I threw nothing, so I had lost in the court of opinion, while his wife sweetly asked about my poor little tomatoes in front of people. But a chlorine reading is not an opinion, and a code officer does not attend the barbecue.
I did not take the bait. I said, the code officer has two months of documentation, the drains, the hose pointed at my beds, the dead plants, and the chlorine reading in the runoff. He inspects the discharge path Wednesday. There are rules about draining pool water onto a neighbors property. You can call me Sherlock, but the city is going to follow your water now.
The documentation was the documentation. There is no little-pool-water-ing your way out of two months of dated drains and a chlorine reading crossing the line.
The city did what my one reasonable mention never could. The inspection confirmed the improper discharge, and the man was ordered to drain his pool to the sewer cleanout or his own property, never across the easement into my garden again.
He drains it the right way now, to his own side. My garden came back the next season, and it is feeding my family again, which is the whole reason it was ever there; it is not a hobby, it is how we stretch the grocery bill.
He can keep his pool like anyone; he just cannot send the chlorine into my vegetables. Two months of a dead garden ended not with a feud, but with two months of quiet documentation and a chlorine reading, and it turned out the man making a federal case out of pool water was just a neighbor whose family ate out of the garden it kept killing.