My Neighbors Digged A Two-Acre Lake In My Land While I Was Out Of State, Then They Told Me That Their Contractor Said It Was Theirs, And That Was The Day I Learned How Expensive Kara Arrogance Can Be

I opened the door and went out.

The smell hit me then. Diesel, wet clay, cut roots, whipped earth. A smell of violence disguised as improvement.

I walked slowly down the hill because if I moved too fast, I was afraid that the anger would come forward to me. The ground had been chewed by heavy machinery. Young oaks lay threaded and half buried in the ground. A white oak sprout that my niece had planted five years earlier had gone completely, nothing was left more than a torn root ball rolled against a clay mound. The grass was crushed where the tracks had turned. The spring channel had been cut and redirected, its clean, cold water feeding the new basin instead of following the shallow line I had followed since before my family owned the place.

When I got to the edge, I stood there and looked through the water.