At the garage sale he pointed at me across the street and told a customer, that is the lady who thinks she owns my fence. So I walked over, very slowly, and handed him a copy of the surveyors stamped map, and I told him the HOA board had the original too, and they had put his fence on the agenda for Monday nights meeting.
Because I had not fought him in the yard. I went to the county recorder and pulled the original plat. I found Rons closing papers in the cedar chest. And I hired a licensed surveyor, nine hundred dollars off my Social Security, who found the original iron pins still in the ground, on my side of his fence.
For a whole spring the only thing I had lacked was proof of where the line truly ran, and the moment a licensed surveyor found the original iron pins on my side of his fence, the confused widow who thinks the block belongs to her became a woman holding a stamped map and the original plat.
He had told the HOA I was confused, and two ladies from my own book club stopped calling. But an iron pin driven in 1991 does not move because a new neighbor says the old survey was wrong, and a stamped map is not confusion.
I did not fight him at the sale. I said, here is the surveyors stamped map, here is the original plat from the county, and the pins are on my side of your fence. The HOA has copies. Your fence is on Mondays agenda. You can keep calling me confused, but the county records are not.
The pins were the pins. There is no the-old-survey-was-wrong-ing your way out of the original markers still in the ground where the licensed surveyor found them.
The HOA did what my trowel-in-hand visit never could. Faced with the stamped survey and the plat, the board ordered the fence moved to the true line, off my property and out of Rons peony bed.
He moved the fence. And this spring the peonies Ron planted for me in 1991 bloomed on my side of the line again, all thirty-three years of them, the way they have every May.
The book club ladies called back once the survey went around, a little sheepish. A spring of being the confused widow ended not with a fight in the yard, but with one stamped map and a pair of iron pins still in the ground, and it turned out the woman who thinks she owns the block was just a widow protecting the flowers her husband left her.