I Inherited 5,700 Acres of Land With a Private Hot Spring — And The HOA Started Charging Tourists Without My Permission

PART 2 — FULL STORY

The deed was still in my jacket pocket when I walked back to the house that morning. I didn’t pull it out at the fence line. I didn’t wave it in Renata Hollis’s face. I just stood there with my hands in my pockets, the paper folded in thirds against my chest, and listened to a woman who had no idea she was standing on land my grandfather had fenced before she was born.

That was the moment the cliffhanger left hanging. The steam rising behind her. The cedar posts silver-gray in the morning cold. The violation notice crisp in my hand. Glenn Abernathy leaning on his truck up the two-track, watching. And the question: what was I going to do with the deed I’d been carrying since my father died?

The answer didn’t come that morning. It came over the next several months, slowly, the way things come when you’ve spent twenty-two years as a hydrological engineer and you’ve learned that systems reveal themselves under observation, not under force. You don’t fix a pressure spike by reacting to the first gauge reading. You document. You verify. You build the record until the record is so complete it can speak for itself.

The first certified letter had arrived six weeks before Renata’s visit. I read it twice at my kitchen table, beside a cup of coffee that had gone cold. It cited Section 4.2 of the Crestline Ridge HOA community standards document — a document I had never seen, never signed, and was not subject to — and informed me that the natural thermal feature at the southern boundary of what they called the “community amenity corridor” was subject to HOA aesthetic and safety regulations. I was required to remove my existing fencing, install a compliant barrier per their specifications, and submit a maintenance plan within thirty days.

The letter contained no recorded covenant number. It cited no deed restriction applicable to my parcel. It referenced no easement, no recorded plat note, no instrument of any kind. It was signed by Renata Hollis, President, and countersigned by a man named Dale Whitmore, Compliance Officer.

I filed it in a manila folder labeled “Crestline HOA” and placed that folder in the second drawer of my office cabinet, behind the original 1931 homestead patent and behind the consolidated deed my father had passed to me. Then I called Glenn Abernathy.

“You know anything about what Crestline’s been doing down at the spring end?” I asked.

Glenn was quiet for a moment. He’s the kind of man who has lived in Mineral County his entire life and knows things before they’re worth knowing. He’s not dramatic. He’s reliable, the way a good fence post is reliable.

“I know they’ve been letting people in,” he said. “I figured you knew.”

I did not know.

What Glenn described, carefully and without editorializing, was this: Sometime in the spring of the previous year, Renata Hollis had begun advertising my hot spring as a premium HOA amenity. By midsummer, the board had established a day-use fee structure — $25 per person, paid through the HOA’s online portal under a line item described as “Thermal Springs Access.” By late summer, the advertising had expanded to the general public. There were listings on at least two outdoor recreation websites. There were reviews. There was a parking arrangement at the end of my access road, where a kid in a yellow vest collected cash from visitors who hadn’t booked online.

Glenn said he’d seen license plates from four different states in that turnout on a single Saturday in August.

I sat with that for a while. The spring my grandfather had fenced in 1947 — fed by a geothermal fault running through my land at 1,800 feet, surfacing at 103 degrees year-round — had been operating as a commercial tourist attraction for at least one full season without my knowledge or permission.

The HOA had not purchased access rights. They had not negotiated a license. They had not contacted me to ask. They had simply decided the spring was within their authority to monetize, and the money had gone into their accounts, and no one had told me.

I was not angry. I want to be precise about that. The absence of anger was not indifference. It was something closer to the feeling you get when you’ve been an engineer long enough to recognize that a system has failed in a way that requires careful documentation before it can be corrected. The anger, if it existed at all, was a distant thing I could see from where I was standing, but had no use for.

What I had use for was the deed, and the survey, and the county recorder’s office.

I called my attorney the following morning. Her name was Patricia Soul, and she practiced property and water rights law out of a two-room office in Missoula that smelled permanently of old paper and pine resin from the building’s original framing. She had handled my father’s estate, and before that, two water rights disputes and a grazing lease renegotiation going back to 1989. She knew the Voss deed the way a doctor knows a patient’s chart — not just the current condition, but the full history.

“Tell me what they sent you,” she said.

I read her the letter. She was quiet for a moment.

“They cite no instrument.”

“No.”

“Do you have the plat for the Pruitt subdivision?”

“I do.”

“Pull it out. I’ll pull mine. Let’s confirm the boundary line before we do anything else.”

That is where the work began. Not with a confrontation, not with a return letter, not with anything that could be mistaken for a reaction. It began with two people in separate offices pulling out the same county documents and reading them carefully, the way the work is supposed to be done.

The Mineral County plat for Crestline Ridge Estates, recorded as plat book 14, page 223, showed the subdivision boundary as a straight line running east-west at a bearing of north 89° 47′ east, beginning at a monument set at the southwest corner of section 22, township 12 north, range 28 west. That line was the legal boundary between the 320-acre development and the Voss parcel.

It did not move. It had not moved since it was surveyed and recorded. And it placed the hot spring, the access trail, the turnout, and every square foot of ground the HOA had been charging money to access entirely within the bounds of Mineral County instrument number 1943-0077.

My land. My deed. My spring.

Patricia said quietly, “Well, that’s interesting.”

She recommended we begin with a title search — a full chain of title review going back to the original homestead patent — to confirm there were no recorded easements, licenses, or covenants running in favor of the HOA or the Pruitt subdivision. She also recommended a new boundary survey, not because the existing monuments were in question, but because fresh stakes and a licensed surveyor’s report would be harder to argue with in any subsequent proceeding.

I agreed to both.

The title search took eleven days. The survey took three weeks, because the surveyor — a methodical man named Ray Okafor who had been doing boundary work in Mineral County for twenty-six years — wanted to locate every original monument before he set anything new.

While I waited, I walked the fence line along the southern boundary, checking the cedar posts my grandfather had set and my father had maintained and I had been maintaining since I was old enough to carry a post driver. The wood was old and gray and solid. A pair of ravens moved through the juniper above me without comment. The spring steamed quietly in the hollow below, the way it had been doing since before any of us were born.

I was not in a hurry. The record was not going anywhere.

Ray Okafor delivered his survey report on a Tuesday morning, driving up the two-track in a mud-caked pickup that looked like it had been asked to do real work, which it had. He spread the plat on my kitchen table beside the original deed and pointed to each monument in turn. Every corner confirmed. Every line held. The hot spring, the access trail, the turnout — the entire corridor the HOA had been advertising as a community amenity — all of it fell within the Voss parcel boundary by a margin of not less than 340 feet at the closest point.

He signed the report and handed it to me.

“No ambiguity,” he said.

I thanked him, filed the report in the Crestline HOA folder, and called Patricia.

The title search had come back clean. No recorded easements running in favor of Crestline Ridge Estates or its HOA. No license agreements. No covenant language in the Pruitt subdivision documents that extended any rights beyond the platted 320 acres. The chain of title on the Voss parcel ran unbroken from the 1931 homestead patent through every recorded instrument to the current deed in my name.

There was no legal foundation for anything Renata Hollis had done. Not the letters. Not the fee structure. Not the online listings. Not the man in the yellow vest collecting cash from tourists at a turnout on my land.

None of it.

Patricia said we were ready to move. The first thing she recommended was not a lawsuit. I want to be clear about that, because it matters to how the rest of this unfolded.

She recommended a demand letter. A single, carefully constructed document that would establish the legal foundation of my ownership with precision, identify each specific act of trespass and unauthorized commercial use, and demand immediate cessation along with a full accounting of all revenue collected.

No threats beyond what the law already provided. No inflammatory language. Just the record, stated plainly — with the instruments cited by number and the boundary coordinates included in an exhibit.

She drafted it over four days. It ran to eleven pages, not because eleven pages were necessary to make the point, but because eleven pages of cited instruments and survey coordinates and recorded plat references have a particular weight that three pages do not.

When someone reads a document that thick and realizes every paragraph is footnoted to a public record they can verify themselves, it communicates something beyond the words. It communicates that the person who assembled it has been patient and thorough.

And patience of that kind does not appear overnight.

The letter went out by certified mail on a Thursday, addressed to Renata Hollis as HOA board president and copied to Dale Whitmore, to the HOA’s registered agent of record at the Montana Secretary of State’s office, and to the attorney whose name appeared on the HOA’s incorporation documents — a Missoula firm that handled mostly residential real estate closings and had, as far as Patricia could determine, no meaningful experience in adverse possession defense or trespass litigation.

The response came twelve days later.

It was not a concession. It was a counter-letter, four pages from the Missoula firm, and it made an argument I had not anticipated. Not because the argument was strong, but because it required a particular kind of confidence to make in writing.

The letter asserted that the hot spring and its surrounding corridor had been used openly, continuously, and without objection by HOA members and the general public for a period exceeding five years, and that this pattern of use had established a prescriptive easement over the relevant portion of the Voss parcel under Montana Code Annotated Section 70-19-404.

I read it at my kitchen table on a morning when the temperature had dropped below freezing for the first time that autumn. And I read it with the particular attention I give to documents that are wrong in interesting ways.

Prescriptive easement under Montana law requires open, notorious, exclusive, adverse, and continuous use for a period of five years. The HOA’s letter asserted all of those elements.

What it did not address — what it could not address — was the exclusivity requirement.

A prescriptive easement cannot be established over land that is also used by the true owner during the prescriptive period.

I had been on that property. I had walked that fence line. I had maintained those cedar posts. I had been present at the spring in every season of every year since the land came to me. And before that, as a working member of the family that owned it.

I called Patricia and read her the relevant paragraph.

“They’re arguing prescriptive easement,” she said.

“They are.”

“Do you have documentation of your own use during the period they’re claiming?”

That is where the engineer’s habit of mind proved useful in a way I had not anticipated when I formed it.

I had kept a running log of property maintenance. Not a formal journal, but a series of dated entries in a spiral notebook I kept in the truck — recording fence work done, posts replaced, wire restrung, water levels checked, grazing lease inspections completed.

The entries covered every year of the five-year window the HOA was claiming as their prescriptive period.

Forty-seven entries.

There were also photographs. I’d gotten into the habit of photographing fence conditions before and after repair work, stored on my phone and backed up to a hard drive. Each image carried an embedded timestamp.

Glenn Abernathy had photographs too. He’d been documenting the HOA’s activity at the spring end of the property for his own reasons — what he described as general irritation at the traffic on the county road. His images showed the yellow-vest operation, the out-of-state license plates, and the portable signage the HOA had erected near the turnout directing visitors to the spring.

Those signs were on my land. Glenn had photographed them with dates.

Patricia said we had more than enough to defeat the prescriptive easement claim. She also wanted to add a cause of action for unjust enrichment — based on the revenue the HOA had collected from the commercial use of my property without my knowledge or consent.

Montana recognizes unjust enrichment as an independent claim where one party has received a benefit at another’s expense under circumstances that make it inequitable to retain that benefit without compensation.

The HOA had collected admission fees from members and from the general public for at least one full season, possibly longer. The online listings Glenn had found were still active, and Patricia’s paralegal had archived them with timestamps before they could be taken down.

The complaint was filed in Mineral County District Court on a Tuesday in late October, when the aspens on the north slope had gone entirely gold and the air smelled of frost and dry grass and the mineral sharpness of the basalt after a cold night.

I drove to the courthouse myself to confirm the filing. I walked up the steps the way my father had walked up those steps when he filed the water rights claim in 1987, and the way his father had walked up steps like them when he recorded the homestead patent in 1931.

There’s something in that continuity that is not sentimental, exactly. It is more like the satisfaction of a system working as it was designed to work. Records kept. Instruments filed. Rights established in the order and manner the law provides for.

The complaint named Renata Hollis individually, named the Crestline Ridge HOA as an entity, and named Dale Whitmore in his capacity as compliance officer. It sought a declaratory judgment confirming my exclusive ownership of the disputed corridor, a permanent injunction against further trespass or commercial use, disgorgement of all revenue collected from the unauthorized operation, and attorney’s fees under the Montana trespass statute.

Patricia had included as Exhibit A the full chain of title from the 1931 homestead patent to the current deed. Exhibit B, Ray Okafor’s survey report with the boundary coordinates. Exhibit C, the certified mail receipts for the HOA’s own letters to me — establishing that they had known who owned the land and chosen to proceed regardless. Exhibit D, my maintenance log and photographs. Exhibit E, Glenn Abernathy’s photographs. Exhibit F, the archived online listings with timestamps.

Six exhibits. Eleven years of paper. Four generations of title.

The HOA’s attorney requested a sixty-day extension to respond. The court granted thirty.

There is a particular quality to waiting when you know the record is complete. It is not the anxious waiting of someone who does not know how things will go. It is something quieter. Closer to the patience my grandfather must have felt when he filed the original homestead claim and then went back to work on the land while the government processed the paperwork.

The land did not require the paperwork to be real. The paperwork only confirmed what was already true.

I understood that. So I went back to work, and I waited.

The HOA’s formal response arrived on the thirtieth day. It was a document that revealed, in its careful omissions as much as in its text, the shape of what had happened inside that board.

The prescriptive easement argument was still there, but narrowed and qualified in ways that suggested the attorney had read Patricia’s complaint carefully and understood which elements were most vulnerable. The exclusivity argument was addressed in a single paragraph that cited no case law and offered no factual basis beyond the assertion that my own use of the property during the relevant period had been “minimal and sporadic.”

Minimal and sporadic.

I had a spiral notebook with forty-seven dated entries over five years. I had photographs with embedded timestamps. Glenn Abernathy had photographs.

The HOA’s attorney had four pages of assertion.

The response also, for the first time, acknowledged the revenue. It did not call it revenue. It described it as “administrative access coordination fees” collected to offset maintenance and safety costs associated with public use of the thermal feature.

The total amount disclosed was $11,400 for the most recent season — described as the only season during which fees had been collected.

The online listings, the HOA’s attorney wrote, had been established by a board member acting without formal board authorization, and the board had not been aware of the full scope of the public-facing operation.

That last sentence was, in Patricia’s assessment, the most legally significant thing in the document.

She called me the morning she read it, and I could hear in her voice the quality of a person who has just been given an unexpected gift.

“They’ve separated themselves from their own board member,” she said. “They’re arguing the commercial operation was unauthorized at the board level.”

“I heard that.”

“That creates a problem for their unjust enrichment defense. If the board is claiming they didn’t authorize the fees, they can’t simultaneously argue the HOA received no benefit from them. The money went into the HOA account. We have the line item.”

She had pulled the HOA’s annual financial disclosure, which Montana law requires HOAs to provide to members on request. A Crestline Ridge homeowner — a retired school teacher named Marvin Cutler, who had lived in the development since it was built and had grown increasingly uncomfortable with what she described as the board’s “expansionist tendencies” — had obtained the most recent disclosure and provided it to Patricia.

The “Thermal Springs Access” line item was there, clearly labeled in the revenue column. $11,400 collected from visitors to my land, deposited into the HOA’s operating account. Spent, according to the expense records, on landscaping near the clubhouse and a new sign at the subdivision entrance.

The sign at the subdivision entrance was, technically speaking, one of my favorite details.

The HOA’s response had not conceded anything. But in trying to limit the damage, it had handed us a cleaner factual record than we had before. They had confirmed the revenue. They had confirmed the access program. They had confirmed that the board had known about it. And in trying to attribute the public-facing operation to a single, unauthorized board member, they had created a conflict within their own defense that their attorney was now going to have to manage in front of a judge.

Patricia filed our reply brief three weeks later. It was eight pages.

It addressed the prescriptive easement argument point by point, citing the maintenance log, the photographs, and two Montana Supreme Court decisions establishing that continuous use by the true owner defeats a prescriptive easement claim regardless of the claimant’s own use during the same period.

It addressed the unjust enrichment claim by attaching the financial disclosure as a new exhibit, with the thermal springs access line item highlighted. It noted, with the dry precision Patricia brought to everything she wrote, that the HOA’s own financial records confirmed receipt of the funds and their subsequent expenditure — and that the board’s attempt to attribute the operation to an unauthorized individual did not alter the entity’s legal obligation to disgorge a benefit received at another’s expense.

The hearing was set for the second week of February.

The land outside my window was deep in winter by then. The basalt rimrock on the north end holding snow in its shadows long after the lower ground had thawed and refrozen. The hot spring steamed in the cold air the way it always had — visible from the ridge as a thin column of vapor rising straight up in the still mornings before the wind came.

The cedar fence posts my grandfather had set stood in the snow the way they had stood through every winter since 1947. Silver-gray. Solid. Entirely unmoved by the events of the preceding months.

The record was complete. The hearing was coming.

And the paper, as it always does when the work has been done carefully, was ready to speak for itself.

The morning of the hearing arrived the way February mornings arrive in southwestern Montana — without ceremony, without warmth, without any particular interest in the human events scheduled to unfold beneath it.

The courthouse in the county seat was a two-story brick building that had been standing since 1922, and the courtroom on the second floor smelled of old wood and radiator heat in the dry stillness of a room that has absorbed a century of argument and resolution.

I arrived early, as I always do when something matters, and sat in the gallery while Patricia arranged her exhibits on the plaintiff’s table with the methodical care of someone who knows that the order in which documents appear before a judge is not a trivial thing.

Renata Hollis arrived twelve minutes after I did. She was dressed carefully — dark blazer, pressed slacks — and carried herself with the same composed authority she had carried to my fence line on that sulfur-and-sage morning the previous spring. Dale Whitmore sat beside her. The HOA’s attorney, a man named Kevin Pratt whose firm had handled the Pruitt subdivision closing and had no meaningful experience in trespass defense, sat at the defense table with a legal pad and the particular expression of someone who has spent the preceding weeks reading case law he wished he had read earlier.

The judge was the Honorable Clara Beecham, who had been on the Mineral County bench for fourteen years and who had, according to Patricia, a reputation for reading every exhibit in a case before the hearing rather than during it.

That reputation proved accurate. When she entered and took her seat and opened the file, she did not look at the parties. She looked at the documents.

The hearing proceeded in the order that hearings of this kind proceed. Opening statements. Submission of exhibits. Argument on the prescriptive easement claim. Argument on the unjust enrichment claim.

Patricia was precise and unhurried. She walked through the chain of title from the 1931 homestead patent to the current deed, citing each recorded instrument by number. She presented Ray Okafor’s survey report and walked the court through the boundary coordinates that placed the hot spring, the access trail, and the turnout entirely within the Voss parcel. She presented my maintenance log and the timestamped photographs establishing continuous owner use throughout the five-year window the HOA had claimed as the prescriptive period. She presented Glenn Abernathy’s photographs of the yellow-vest operation, the portable signage, the out-of-state license plates in my turnout.

Then she presented the HOA’s own financial disclosure with the thermal springs access revenue line item in the amount of $11,400.

Kevin Pratt’s argument on prescriptive easement lasted approximately twenty minutes. He cited the open and notorious elements without difficulty, because those were not in dispute. The HOA had indeed been using the spring openly and notoriously — which was rather the point.

When he reached the exclusivity element, he offered the phrase that had appeared in his written response: that my use of the property during the relevant period had been “minimal and sporadic.”

Judge Beecham looked up from the documents for the first time.

“Counsel,” she said, “I have before me a maintenance log with forty-seven dated entries over five years and a set of timestamped photographs that correspond to those entries. Are you prepared to offer evidence that contradicts the factual record of the plaintiff’s continuous use?”

Kevin Pratt said he was not at this time in a position to offer contradicting evidence, but that he believed the weight of the use favored his clients.

Judge Beecham looked at him for a moment without expression.

Then she returned to the documents.

The unjust enrichment argument took less time. Patricia presented the financial disclosure, the archived online listings, and the HOA’s own written response to the complaint — which had confirmed receipt of the revenue and its expenditure on HOA common area improvements.

She cited Montana Code Annotated Section 27-1-704, which provides that a party who has received a benefit at another’s expense under circumstances making it inequitable to retain that benefit without compensation is liable in restitution.

She noted that the HOA had not merely received a passive benefit. They had actively solicited the public, established a fee structure, collected cash through an agent, and deposited the proceeds into their operating account.

Kevin Pratt argued that the board had not fully authorized the public-facing operation, and that the individual board member responsible bore personal liability that should not be attributed to the entity.

Patricia replied that the HOA’s own financial records showed the revenue received by the entity and spent by the entity — and that the question of internal board authorization did not alter the entity’s obligation to disgorge a benefit received from the use of another person’s land.

Judge Beecham took the matter under advisement and indicated she would issue a written ruling within thirty days.

I walked out of the courthouse into the February cold and stood on the steps for a moment, the way my father had stood on steps like these, and the way his father had stood on steps like these before him.

The air was sharp and still. A raven crossed the pale sky above the building without comment.

I drove home.

The ruling arrived on the twenty-second day.

Judge Beecham’s order ran to nineteen pages, and it was, in Patricia’s assessment, as complete a legal vindication as the facts permitted.

On the prescriptive easement claim, the court found that the HOA had failed to establish the exclusivity element required under Montana Code Annotated Section 70-19-404, citing the documented evidence of continuous owner use throughout the claimed prescriptive period. The court quoted the relevant Montana Supreme Court standard directly: that a prescriptive easement cannot ripen where the true owner has continued to exercise dominion over the subject property during the prescriptive period, regardless of the claimant’s own use during that time.

The claim was denied in its entirety.

A declaratory judgment was entered confirming my exclusive ownership of the disputed corridor — including the hot spring, the access trail, and the turnout — with the boundary coordinates from Ray Okafor’s survey incorporated into the order by reference.

On the unjust enrichment claim, the court found that the HOA had received a quantifiable benefit — the $11,400 in access fees — at my expense under circumstances that made retention of that benefit without compensation inequitable as a matter of law.

The HOA was ordered to disgorge the full amount plus prejudgment interest calculated from the date the first fee was collected.

The court also ordered attorney’s fees under the Montana trespass statute, finding that the HOA’s continued operation of a commercial access program on my land after receiving the demand letter constituted a knowing trespass.

The permanent injunction was granted. The Crestline Ridge HOA, its board members in their official capacities, and their agents were permanently enjoined from accessing, advertising, charging fees for, or in any way exercising dominion over any portion of the Voss parcel described in Mineral County Instrument number 1943-0077.

The portable signs were gone within a week. The online listings came down. The man in the yellow vest did not return to the turnout.

At the HOA’s next annual meeting — held in the clubhouse of Crestline Ridge Estates on a March evening I did not attend and had no interest in attending — the membership voted to remove Renata Hollis from the board presidency. Dale Whitmore resigned before the vote was taken.

Marvin Cutler sent me a brief note afterward. She said the meeting had been quiet and uncomfortable, and that most of the members had not known until the lawsuit the full extent of what the board had been doing in their name. She said she was sorry it had come to that.

I wrote back and told her there was nothing to apologize for, and that I hoped the new board would find the development’s actual common areas sufficient for their needs.

They were, as far as I knew, sufficient.

The restitution check arrived by certified mail in early April, signed by the HOA’s new treasurer. $11,400 and some change, plus interest. I deposited it and filed the receipt in the Crestline HOA folder, which I then moved to the back of the second drawer — behind the deed and behind the original 1931 homestead patent, where it has remained.

That spring, on a morning when the sage was just beginning to green at the lower elevations and the first pair of mallards had returned to the seasonal creek below the spring, I walked the fence line along the southern boundary the way I had been walking it since I was old enough to carry a post driver.

The cedar posts my grandfather had set in 1947 stood where they had always stood. Silver-gray. Solid. The wire between them holding its tension the way good wire does when it has been maintained by people who understood that maintenance is not a chore but a form of argument.

An assertion made quietly and repeatedly over time that this is here, and it is mine, and I have not abandoned it.

I crouched at the edge of the spring the way I had crouched there on the morning Renata Hollis had come to deliver her violation notice, and let the steam touch my face, and listened to the water move in the way it had been moving since before any of us were born. Slow. Mineral-warm. Rising from somewhere deep and old and entirely indifferent to the events of the preceding year.

The land did not know what had happened. It did not need to. The record knew, and the record was sufficient.

What I have come to understand through this — and through the years of water rights work that preceded it — is that the first question to ask when an institution with apparent authority makes a claim against you is not whether the claim feels legitimate. It is not whether the person making it carries themselves with confidence. It is not whether the letter is written on official stationery with a compliance officer’s signature at the bottom.

The first question is whether the claim has a legal foundation. Whether there is an instrument, recorded and verifiable, that gives the claiming party the right they are asserting. A deed. An easement. A covenant running with the land. Something in the public record that a title search will find.

If the answer is yes, you need to understand the scope and the limits of that instrument.

If the answer is no, then everything that follows from the claim — the letters, the fees, the signs, the man in the yellow vest — is built on nothing.

And nothing, when examined carefully and patiently in the proper venue, tends to collapse under its own weight.

The answer is always in the record. It was in the record in 1931 when Elias Voss filed the homestead patent. It was in the record in 1978 when the consolidated deed passed to my father. It was in the record when I inherited it. And it was in the record on the morning Renata Hollis stood at my fence line and told me I had fourteen days to comply.

She had simply never looked.

The mallards settled onto the creek below the spring, unhurried the way they always do. The steam rose straight up in the still morning air. The cedar posts held.

THE END.

* Disclaimer: This story is fictional and serves for entertainment purpose only. It does not represent any real person nor organization, nor encourage inappropriate behaviors.