Once upon a time, there was a family of Papa, Mama and their three cubs who moved into a nice four-bedroom colonial house near the children's school. It gave them bedrooms, a nice family room and a yard for cookouts and kicking a football around during halftime of Michigan games. The one drawback to the house was that it backed up onto a fairly busy street and offered no privacy for these backyard family activities, but they decided to give it a try nevertheless.

Papa Bear was full of energy and wanted to provide what was best for his family, so he began to build a fence. It was a pretty fence that zig-zagged a bit for visual interest and was set back some from the street to avoid being too imposing, yet it offered a background for plantings and created a nice area around the patio for sitting out to enjoy the fresh air and bird songs (or whatever was discernible of those over the aroma and noise of the nearby street).

Well, the local municipality decided that the fence had to go because of a Rule. Apparently any fence in a front yard was to be confined to no higher than 4 feet, and the horizontal boards would need to be spaced at least as far apart as the width of the board to prevent it from being opaque and "wall-like". Front yard, you ask? So did the kindly Bear family. They found that, in the eyes of the city, any yard that fronts a street is (aha!) a Front Yard. Papa and Mama Bear tried tearfully to convince the city that it was less than fair to force them to have two front yards and no back yard for privacy, but to no avail. They moved their fence, spaced their boards, planted some evergreens as a screen, and moved out of the house several years later.

Fast forward to 2006: As I said above, I wish we'd thought of this.

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