Two days later a car nobody here had ever seen pulled up out front, and the man who got out asked to be shown to the board president, and he had a folder under his arm and a badge clipped to his jacket.
The president came down all smiles, expecting a buyer or an inspector, somebody on her side. Mr Tate sat on the lobby bench in his cardigan and did not say a word.
The man gave his name and his office, something with the state and with historical preservation, and then he said, plainly, that the property in question was not an eyesore. It was of documented historical and horticultural interest, and the man in the cardigan was the reason.
Those old tomatoes in buckets were a heritage variety Mr Tate had kept alive by hand for sixty years, seeds carried down through generations, a strain that existed in almost no other garden left in the state.
And the seashells laid out in a spiral, the thing the president had mocked as the doodling of a senile old man, were arranged in a precise pattern that a marine institute had been documenting, because Mr Tate had spent decades as a self-taught naturalist cataloging shells off that coast, and his little spiral was a teaching display that schoolchildren were brought to see.
The state had been in quiet conversation with Mr Tate for over a year about protecting his collection, which was why he had said, calm as could be, that he had been expecting this meeting.
The president had gone pale. But the man from the state was not finished, and here is the part I keep turning over.
He said he had been sent the recording of the last meeting, the one where the president said the old man was not all there and his family needed to come get him before he burned the place down. And he said, in his line of work, he spent his days proving that the things people are quickest to throw away are usually the things most worth keeping. Then he nodded to the bench and said the man that board had written off as a senile fire hazard had, at ninety-one, been keeping a living piece of this states natural history that scientists drove across the state to study.
He asked the room to consider who in it truly could not tell the difference anymore.
The fine was voided that afternoon. Mr Tate stood, buttoned his cardigan, and said only that the tomatoes came ripe in June and everyone was welcome to a basket.
His balcony is protected now, buckets, shells, spiral and all. The children still come to see it. And nobody in our building talks anymore about which of the old folks needs to be taken away, because the oldest man among us turned out to be the keeper of something none of the rest of us even knew we had.