The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight

The notice was taped to my storm door with blue painter’s tape, the kind that peels the paint when you pull it down. I pulled it down anyway. I stood on my front step at seven in the morning in my socks and read it twice.

Effective the first of next month, lot rent at Meadowlark Court would be $800. Not $400. Eight hundred. Residents who were unable to meet the new rate were free to remove their homes from the property by the same date. At the bottom was a tear-off slip that said I acknowledged the new terms, with a line for my signature and a drop box number at the office.

I read it a third time. It was not anger that came up in me. It was arithmetic. I am sixty-seven years old, and I have done arithmetic on a Social Security check every month for five years. My check is $1,812. Take out the Medicare supplement and the pills and the electric and the propane, and the $400 lot rent had been the one number I never had to think hard about.

Now it was the biggest number I had.

Across the gravel lane, the storm door of number fourteen banged open, and Edith Nunley came out onto her step in her housecoat with the same piece of paper in her hand. She is eighty-eight. She has lived in that trailer since 1990.

“Homer,” she said. “Is this a joke?”

“I don’t think so, Edith.”

“Where would I take it?” she said. “Where in the world would I take it?”

I did not have an answer for her. Not then.

Meadowlark Court sits on the east edge of Nevada, Missouri, out past the feed store, on eleven acres that used to be a hay field. There are forty-six lots on three gravel lanes and one old lagoon at the back that handles the sewer. Forty-one of those lots had somebody living on them that fall. Mostly single-wides from the seventies and eighties, with little wooden porches somebody added by hand, flower pots, and folding chairs set out where the evening sun hits.

A man named Rollie Dobbs built the park in 1986 and ran it until the winter before this one, when he died. Rollie fixed the water line himself. He plowed the lanes with his own tractor. For eighteen years he held the lot rent at $395, and when he finally raised it to $400 he came to every door personally and apologized for it. His daughter in Colorado inherited the park, and she did what a lot of people do with a thing they cannot manage from a thousand miles away. She sold it.

In June it went to a company out of Scottsdale, Arizona, called Silver Mesa Holdings. We got a nice letter. It said they were excited to be partners in our community.

My name is Homer Eastman. I spent twenty-two years on the Vernon County road crew, most of them running a motor grader, and I am not a man who has ever made a speech or been asked to. My wife Corinne passed three years ago in March. I stayed in our trailer because it was paid for, and the lot rent was something I could carry on a check that had been cut nearly in half when she died.