The Orchard They Came To Measure
Our town has grown up around us in a way neither of us ever planned for. When Arvid bought this half acre in 1961 it sat a good two miles outside the city limits, nothing between us and the grain elevator but corn ground and one gravel crossroad. These past six years, with the poultry processing plant going in off Highway 30 and the new houses filling in behind the school, the town council has been annexing a strip at a time, and our little acreage now sits right at the edge of what the county assessor calls the growth corridor, which means our land is valued differently than it was, and taxed differently than it was, and is apparently worth quite a lot more to a man with a storage unit business than it is to a woman who just wants her husband’s trees left alone.
I got out of the car. The gravel was loud under my church shoes.
“Esther.” Brad said it like he was glad to see me, which told me right away that he was not glad to see me, because Brad only uses my first name like that when he has already decided how a conversation is going to go and is hoping I will go along with the script. “This is Troy. He’s with Prairie Rock Development, out of Cedar Rapids.”
Troy put his clipboard under his arm and shook my hand properly, the way his mother had clearly taught him, and said it was nice to meet me, ma’am.
“What are you measuring,” I said. I did not say it unkind. I said it the way you ask a question when you already have a feeling about the answer and you are only asking so the other person has to be the one to say it out loud.
“Storage units,” Brad said. “Climate controlled. The kind with the keypad gate. Troy’s company has already put one in over by the implement dealer, and with the new poultry plant coming, this whole corridor out here is going to need it. We’re right at the edge of where the town’s annexing.”
“On the orchard,” I said.
“On the half acre that isn’t doing anything but costing you in spray and pruning and a tree service bill every fall when the wind takes a limb down,” Brad said, and he said it kindly, which was somehow worse than if he had said it mean. “Esther, I counted. You paid Danny’s crew four hundred dollars last October just to get the deadfall out. You’re seventy one. Nobody’s saying get rid of the house. Just this piece.”
“It’s not costing anything,” I said. “It’s giving. That’s different from costing.”
“It’s a chore you’re too old to keep up with,” Brad said, gentle as anything, like he was handing me a blanket instead of taking something. “That’s all I’m saying. And it would mean real money coming in every month instead of going out. Prairie Rock pays a land lease that would more than cover your property taxes for the next twenty years.”
“How much,” I said, because I have never once in my life signed anything, or let anyone talk about signing anything, without hearing the real number said out loud first.