I will tell the truth: for a brief second, it seemed peaceful.
The sky was gold. The water was still. The dock was handsome. If you didn’t know what had been cut, redirected, buried, and ignored to create it, you might have thought it belonged there.
That second was dangerous.
That’s how the invasion sometimes works. Not with ugliness, but with the beauty used as an argument. Once the wrong thing becomes attractive, people start asking if undoing it is a des perdico. They stop asking who was entitled to do it in the first place.
I heard my grandfather again.
You let one thing slide, you teach people to treat you.
On the twenty-two day, I called Curtis Hale.
Curtis owned Hale Earthworks and had been moving land through three counties for over thirty years. He was a compact man with a gray beard, heavy hands and a voice that rarely rose above a grave murmur. He had buried water lines, built farm ponds, repaired worn roads, cleared storm damage and once moved all over a hillside where he belonged after a developer learned drainage the hard way.
