What I know is this. The morning I sat in my truck halfway up the gravel drive and understood that my fence was gone, there was a version of me that might have walked over to Ethan’s patio, had the argument, and eventually decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
That version would have been smaller.
Not humble, not mature, just smaller, in the specific way that you become smaller when you let someone teach you that what you built and paid for and care about is negotiable if the person challenging it is confident enough. I didn’t become that version. I called Laura.
I photographed the damage and documented the timeline and showed up to the hearings and let the law say what it needed to say, and when the law required action I hired Miguel and poured concrete and drove steel posts into the earth at the exact coordinates the survey said were mine.
The fence stands. Daisy runs the yard in the evenings and comes back to the porch and settles at my feet and has no complicated feelings about any of it, which I have come to regard as a kind of wisdom.
The iced tea gets warm while I sit out there thinking about it, and the crickets are loud in the trees, and the fence is just a dark line at the edge of what’s mine, and when I close the gate at night the feeling is exactly what it was before any of this happened. The world stays outside.
That’s all it was ever supposed to do.
