I remembered that sentence while I stood beside the lake that did not belong there.
For most of my life, the land south of ours belonged to Mr. Rollins. His first name was Edward, but nobody called him that except his late wife, and even she mostly called him Rollins when she was irritated. He ran cattle, patched fences with baling wire, and drove a blue tractor that coughed black smoke every time he started it. He was quiet in the way old farmers can be quiet, not because they have nothing to say but because most things worth saying don’t require decoration.
We never had a boundary problem. If one of his cows slipped through a weak spot, he came and got it. If a storm knocked a cedar across the fence, we cut it together. Once, his bull got loose and tore up half an acre of my ryegrass, and he showed up the next morning with two fence posts, a roll of wire, and an apology so brief it would have fit on a matchbook. That was enough. People worked things out because they expected to see each other again at the feed store, at church, at the county co-op, or broken down on the shoulder of Highway 72 with a flat tire and no cell signal.
When Mr. Rollins died, things changed slowly at first and then all at once.
