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There is just no end to
the circumstances we've endured from behind our property and for how many
years I can't even count. Everything from fire, the worst smell of hogs and
now this. When we bought the land by some stroke of good fortune in thinking
of the future we did have the seller put a ban on hogs in the covenant. We
didn't dream anyone would try to ranch an acre with cattle. As romantic as
the smell of a barnyard might be somehow my memory must be lacking on that.
The ranch house was located in front of the cow barn and at a distance. Even
at that, when one of the children was lost from being weakened by an attack
of diarrhea the doctor made it plain that none of the hands should ever be
allowed in the house on the carpet after having worked with the cattle in
the barnyard.
My visits to the beauty
shop have been few and far between over the years but for some reason I had
the urge to get a perm. The pampering a beautician gives us while taking
care of our beat psychic and emotional low is probably of more value than
the hair do itself and I knew this. However, as I came to our drive upon
returning home there were cars lined up as if my husband had called all the
neighbors for a get together while I was gone. The strange thing was the
whole property appeared to be vacant with no one in the house or the yard.
"What is going on around
here? I can't be gone but for a couple hours without everything falling
apart." I was muttering to myself.
Almost as if to answer my
question the phone rang. "Did you see the fire we had?" My neighbor's
quiet, sweet voice casually asked.
"Fire? No! What fire?"
I'm blissfully ignorant of any catastrophe but suddenly shaken out of my
calm recently given me from my break at the beauty shop.
The folks behind us were
burning trash and it got away from them. We all had to park our cars in your
drive because Rodney was out there at your property line with the hose
putting it out. It burned right up to my backdoor." Now this would be a
whole different story with what we went through with the ecology people to
finally inforce the no-burn laws in Oklahoma.
The hog story is another
one and I won't even go through those painful recollections. Thank heaven
the gentleman next door was living then and he took care of that with
threats of involving the health department.
So what is the moral to
this story? I suppose it is simply that if you are buying an acreage in the
country be sure you cross all the t's and dot all your i's when it comes to
writing up the by-laws in the covenants of the total area or take the
consequences, "mess with the bull, get the horn." At the moment we can't
afford to replace this decorative fence with a real one, but, on the other
hand, we can't afford not to do so.
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