The Land Is Not for Sale

Well, no, actually it was not a very happy Thanksgiving Day. Off-and-on rain kept the Professional Bad Neighbor busy spraying poison on acreage he's bought, legally, in the daytime, and on my hedge, criminally, after dark. Relatives prudently gathered at someone else's house. 

All night I had those pseudo-cardiac symptoms; my heartbeat sped up and slowed down, pounded and barely beat, like that poor little late-summer kitten Serena had. Serena brought him to me before she'd even finished cleaning him, said "Do what you can," and moved on, not showing much hope. The kitten was born alive, sort of, but his little heart never found a steady rhythm. It beat harder and less hard, faster and slower, for a few hours while the kitten uttered his first squeaks and took his first creeping steps. He took a few kitten-naps; I could see his heart beating irregularly while he rested. And then his heart stopped altogether.

My heart recovered its steady rhythm. It's done this before. I do not have cardiovascular disease. It is a reaction to chemicals that are sprayed along roads. If I knew which one, I'd probably be posting research about that one too. What killed the kitten might have been a reaction to the same chemical. 

I went into town to see if a payment had come in. It had. I thought I saw a friend's car parked beside her storage barn. It was not her car. It belonged to a former neighbor with notions of real estate speculation in his head. Neighbor acted very, very neighborly, offered me a lift all the way home, and even started trying to carry in a sack of kibble, to get a good look. 

Yes, my home is begging for renovation. Yes, the last man I cared anything about was a builder. Yes, we had plans to remodel it, which aren't going anywhere until my neighborhood is rid, I mean to say cleaned, of the Professional Bad Neighbor. It's no use buying more hardware to repair surface damage just so a Professional Bad Neighbor can creep around on the next moonlit night and damage it again. Yes, not only is the exterior of the house a wreck, with the rain gutter hanging down to bear witness to the morning I saw a pole hanging from it and, looking out the window, saw the pole being manipulated by someone in a truck that had the shape of the Bad Neighbor's, and the raw edges of wire showing where the fence has been cut, and the effects of illegal poison spraying showing especially in the hedge but also in the orchard...not only that, but also the yard is booby-trapped. It's perfectly all right by me if the Professional Bad Neighbor steps on a board with a nail sticking out of it, or better yet falls face-down on one. No, that's not the way I'd like my home to be, but it is external and temporary; it'll be easy enough to change.

"Nice place up here." There are things people with notions about real estate speculation can't keep from saying. They react to the Cat Sanctuary as predictably as lonely men react to C-cups; they all but literally drool. "But isn't it a long walk for you? Wouldn't you like to sell it and move into a place closer to town?"

I would not. 

For one thing, women who live alone in town tend to encounter even more harassment than women who live at the far end of roads maintained to discourage motor traffic. And, until we get a good tight law about spraying any kind of chemicals into the air, they're exposed to even more pollution. 

For another thing, keeping the house means that, in another thirty or forty years when I do expect to want younger people in the house all the time, I'll have something to offer them; by that time the Professional Bad Neighbor will undoubtedly have died, and the old home place should be a good healthy place for children. The house needs work; it won't take the sort of young people I'd be willing to share a house with very long to get that work done. Then they will have a pleasant place to live, and can decide whether they want to maiantain it as a tourist attraction--for its historic value--or keep it private.

And meanwhile, I am not yet seventy years old and still have the biblical right--even the duty--to remarry if the right sort of man presents himself, and the old house is a test. For the right sort of man it will be a positive attraction, as it was for my Significant Other. For the other kind, it will be an effective repellent. The right sort of man does not want to be close to town, does not want to be able to drive a show-off sports car right up to the door, does not want to be able to see neighbors without going out and looking for them. The right sort of man understands that physical work is what tells bodies, even in the presence of the longevity gene, to keep rebuilding themselves rather than breaking down. The right sort of man intends to enjoy maintaining a house and land, and working for other people too, until he and I are at least eighty and preferably ninety years old. 

Men who had symptoms other people noticed, with coronavirus, might be eligible to share the rest of my wholesome rural life. Men who were seriously ill with Long COVID, like the Professional Bad Neighbor, are the ones who should be thinking about "little places in town," and if they want me to do errands and housekeeping for them, they'd better have more to offer than their "little places in town." 

Obviously it's not likely that a man I'd want to marry, now, could exist. Then again it was extremely unlikely that either the man I did marry or the one I wanted to marry could have existed; the odds seem to have been heavily against most of my ancestors doing most of what they did, and were against my doing most of what I've done, and that includes finding men that you certainly don't meet every day. So if my "being alooone" is so important to you relatives, focus on finding another improbable man for me to marry.

It has often occurred to me, as I let the cool mountain breeze blow the mind-pollution of townspeople's conversation out of my head, that people who have coveted the house and land really ought to have started planning sooner.

If I'd been offered a job, preferably the one I wanted in the town library, right out of high school. If I'd been able to rent a "little place in town" when I was at the age for that sort of thing, so that my parents hadn't made the decisions about my going to college. If an employer had paid me to go to a public school and take courses relevant to my "career" working in town. If I'd been close enough to where I wanted to be that I didn't feel homesick, earning money and being treated like an adult, instead of working in the city with no career goal except to move back home. If I'd been allowed to yuppify enough to have been compatible with that dear, sweet, kind, congenial, intelligent, child-and-animal-loving, and even good-looking yuppie from Kingsport that I seriously considered marrying, instead of kissing and saying goodbye because we were taking different roads in life. If I'd become one of the "insiders" in what the rest of the county describe as the Gate City Clique, and they really do operate very much like a middle school clique...I might have grown up to be that sort of person, if I'd started at a formative age. 

I might have grown up to be a yuppie. And a Republican. And the size of most of my school friends who got those nice steady lifelong jobs in town. And so satisfied with a comfortable, rewarding life that I'd feel ready to retire at age 65, and die at age 70, as a friend who lives in town says she does. I might have given up the idea of being a writer, or settled for writing a nice, bland, predictable column for a church or local paper. I might now be all that it implied by the label "White." A real White Woman From Town. Dressing and decorating my nice house in town in the latest fashion, driving everywhere because who has time to walk across town to the post office; not only taking my trench coat in case of rain, but wearing it all day because I'd feel cold, in the kind of weather today's has been. I might even have found enough occasions to "make up" my face to have ever got used to the frankly icky sensation of having paint on my face.

But no. While I was too young and unformed to shove back, other people shoved me onto the road my life's taken. I was only allowed to go to college if it was one that cost too much for me to form the habits of shopping or eating in restaurants, where I formed the habits of doing odd jobs and supporting urban missions instead. I was not offered a job I could do while going to a more affordable college. I have yet to be thanked for not driving, though Heaven only knows how many townsfolk's lives I've saved. I've been harassed and discriminated against for walking into town and, though most people in town neither harass nor discriminate against anybody, they've not made me feel that my help was greatly needed or appreciated. I have found that all good long-term relationships, business or personal, begin when people feel at least as much need for my help as I do for theirs. It takes a certain amount of "please" and "thank you" for me to feel much interest in another person. I've loved and been loved by good men, and am not really interested in the sort of "relationships" second-rate men have to offer. And so, at my official cyberspace-entities-age-by-decades age of fifty (plus), I find absolutely no reason to want to be in town for a minute longer than it takes to do a job or an errand. Not even my own town; though most other towns are noisier and more polluted than mine. 

And then, too, cousins who are older and taller and stronger failed to step up and maintain the family tradition on our ancestral land. I'm afraid--and I am afraid, I'm not looking forward to it any more than poor old Prince Charles was looking forward to being an orphan and King of England--I'm only a relative or two away from being the head of the clan. Temptations to settle for what seems like an easier life of conformism in a "little place in town" might not work for me if another relative weren't up here carrying on in the ways our elders taught us. 

Knowing how to use new, fragile, unsustainable things like the Internet, the power grid, and the internal combustion engine; but also knowing that it's more important to know how to do without them.

Knowing that it's better to be free and live in a cave than to feel like a prisoner in, and of, even the nicest house in town.

Accepting our Whiteness, but never forgetting that we're not only White and we're not From Town.

Those things need to be done and, though our elders might have tried to prepare other relatives to do them, I happen to be the one for whom it worked. Probably because, unlike some cousins, I was not offered a nice smooth yuppie life in time to be tempted by it. I finished high school just a year and a half too early, and now it is forever too late. 

For those friends and relatives who just "didn't want to take sides" because "after all, it can't be best for even a family of only women and children to be aloooone in the woooods!", their time might be more profitably occupied in finding the sort of man who would want, and deserve, to share my home and life. Admit that I'm not a "young girl" any more, that I know my own mind if I know anything, and that you've been stubborn and silly to expect that I'd marry anyone whose life plans didn't fit nicely in beside mine. 

I'm not really alone; most of The Nephews are young adults by now, and some of the men are pretty big and strong. Do they need to move in with me? Certainly not until they want to. Whenever one of them has had some success in a job person can take to wherever person chooses to live, and wants a good wholesome place to bring up children at a healthy distance from "the corruption that is in this world," the place is here. Meanwhile, fat old men who have done themselves enough damage to have had "Long COVID" should avoid coming within sight of the Cat Sanctuary. Some of The Nephews are physically related to me, Old Wrymouth, Disgrace to the Clan. They inherited the same super-senses we did...when we were their age. Your sight has dimmed, your strength has diminished, and both your marksmanship and your driving have deteriorated to the point where, if your nephews really had any use for you, they'd be taking the guns and the keys away. 

I am afraid (actually, in this case, I am sadistically delighted) that nothing good can be expected from the old age of a Professional Bad Neighbor who has chosen evil, Wrymouth. Even if he was once "the smart one," and came to hate me because I was also presented to the outside world as "the smart one" before he was full-grown. It's bad enough to have outlived our elders in the normal course of events; it's worse to have lost first a husband and then a lover to cancer, and a brother to misadventure...it must be utterly miserable not to have had a family long because, not only did one do them wrong, one did every one of them in. 

Real estate speculators annoy me, Wrymouth, and you had best not try selling any acreage to them. This particular ridge is for the direct descendants of the man who surveyed the town of Gate City and chose the place that is naturally most desirable for himself and his heirs. You are not one of the few. I recommend you try to persuade one of the family you tried to "run off" to take the land you've been able to "run anyone off" of. If you make the land a gift, pay all processing fees to register the transfer as final, and pay the one who accepts the land a monthly stipend for the time it will take to undo your damage, and then get your miserable carcass out of Virginia, you might be able to resolve matters in a way that won't harm whatever nieces and nephews you still have. I think New Orleans is the place for you to spend your old age. It is a good long way from here, and also it is a place where, every time you take a drink of water, you will be moved to pray that a dozen people upstream from you have been Good People, like me, and not evildoers like your loathsome self.

The land is to be either inherited or bestowed as a gift. It is to be owned by those of the family who can best use it, which means, of course, sharing it with the rest of the family. It is not for sale in the ordinary sense. Some exchange of benefits may take place when titles are transferred between family members but no bank, and no real estate agents, are to be involved. 

The land is for people who walk, not drive. It is for people who know better than to open a door that is closed unless they see a note telling them how long they should expect to wait, and inviting them to wait indoors. It is for people who know one another's animals, even the chickens--by name--and lead them home if they stray. All of the land is for all of the children to enjoy. None of the land is for people who value money higher than land.

The land is not for sale, Wrymouth. Perhaps you have been told to your face, by now, that "These Colors Don't Run." Perhaps you have been asked questions about the basis for the charges against our short-term neighbor from Mexico, or the very mysterious illnesses of the old beekeeper and of Grandma Bonnie Peters. There will be more of those questions, Wrymouth. There may also be questions about the mysterious sudden death of the young tree pruner. We don't run. You start running!

No real estate speculators need to inquire about the land the surveyor claimed for himself.

There is not enough gold in California.

There are not enough diamonds in Kimberley.

There is not enough oil under the Persian Gulf. 

There is not and will never be enough money to buy good land from good people. You may go home and rue the day you crossed the path of one of them.