I remembered that phrase while I was by the lake that didn’t belong there.
For most of my life, the land south of ours belonged to Mr. Rollins. His first name was Edward, but no one called him that except his late wife, and even she called him Rollins when she was irritated. He ran cattle, patched fences with packing wire, and drove a blue tractor that coughed up black smoke every time he started it. It was quiet in the way old farmers can be calm, not because they have nothing to say, but because most of the things worth saying don’t require decoration.
We never had a border problem. If one of his cows slipped down a weak spot, he would come and get it. If a storm hit a cedar through the fence, we cut it together. Once, his bull broke loose and broke half an acre of my ryegrass, and he appeared the next morning with two fence posts, a roll of wire and an apology so brief that he would have fitted into a match book. That was enough. People would figure things out because they hoped to meet again at the feed store, in the church, in the county cooperative, or broken down on the shoulder of Highway 72 with a flat tire and no cell signal.
