The Boundary Line My Neighbor Erased
“Did you contact your neighbor’s title company, the county recorder, or anyone with legal authority over that boundary before you removed it?”
He said no again, quieter the second time.
She did not take long to rule. She found in my favor on every count, ordered Barry to pay the full nine thousand one hundred dollars to rebuild the fence to its original specification, the two thousand one hundred dollars for Hubert’s survey, and an additional three thousand dollars in the trespass and conversion claim for the county survey markers and the deliberate manner in which the property had been altered while I was away caring for a family emergency. Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars in total, and an order that any future boundary dispute between our two properties would be settled exclusively by reference to the recorded survey now on file with the county, not by anyone’s tape measure.
Barry did not look at me on his way out of the courtroom. Kim did, for just a moment, and I could not read what was in it. Something between apology and exhaustion, maybe, or maybe I only wanted to see that there.
The Line, Restored
The fencing contractor started work on a Monday in October, six weeks after the hearing, paid in full by a certified check from Barry’s own account because the judge’s order had given him thirty days and he apparently preferred to be done with the whole matter rather than draw it out further. The crew rebuilt two hundred and ten feet of pressure treated pine along the exact line Hubert’s survey had confirmed, post for post, matching the original as closely as nine years of weathering allowed.
At the northeast corner, where Hubert had found that first iron pin under eleven inches of clay, the contractor drove a new fence post directly beside it and beside Hubert’s own capped survey stake, so that anyone standing in that corner of the yard would find three markers within arm’s reach of each other, one from 1974, one from Hubert’s report, and one holding up a fence that finally matched all the paperwork that had ever existed about where it belonged.
Hubert came back out one more time, at my request and at my own expense this time, to record the restored boundary formally at the county courthouse, a supplemental plat referencing his original survey so that no future owner of either property, whether that is me or Barry or somebody neither of us has met yet, will ever again have to guess where that line runs. It is a matter of public record now. Anyone can walk into the recorder’s office and pull it.
Barry has not mentioned opening up the yards again. He waves sometimes, a short flat wave that asks for nothing back, and I return it the same way, because I am not interested in being unpleasant to a man who has to live forty feet from me for as long as either of us stays. Kim brought over a pound cake the week the new fence went up, set it on my porch steps without knocking, and left before I came to the door. I do not know exactly what that meant either, but I ate the cake, and I did not read anything more into it than a woman trying, in the only way she felt she could, to say something her husband never did.