The next morning I got up, got dressed, took a garden trowel and my reading glasses out to Junes birdbath, and dug down to the old brass survey marker June and I found in the dirt the day we planted in 1979, and that marker turned my neighbor Brads whole survey upside down.
Brad had stood at Junes little picket fence with a fresh survey and told me her garden was six feet over the line, that he was putting in a pool, that Id move the fence and the tomatoes and the birdbath in thirty days or hed do it for me, that at my age it was a lot of work anyway, that hed get his six feet one way or the other.
He had paid for a new survey. He had not gone looking for the original monument, the one under the birdbath.
The true, original brass survey marker set by the county when these lots were first platted was buried right under Junes birdbath, and it proved that the real property line runs six feet the other way, which means Junes garden is entirely on our land, and part of Brads new fence is actually on ours.
June and I found that monument the first spring, in 1979, and instead of digging it up we set her birdbath over it to protect it, and we noted it on our own deed survey, recorded, all these years ago. An original recorded monument controls over any new survey a man orders to suit himself. Brads surveyor never found it because Brad never told him to look under the birdbath.
I took the old survey and the marker location to a licensed surveyor and then to a lawyer. They confirmed it in an afternoon. The true line is six feet toward Brads house, not mine. June never grew a tomato on his land. If anything, his new fence posts sit on ours.
When Brad came back to move my fence, I did not argue. I handed him the recorded original survey and I showed him the brass monument under the birdbath and I said, you might want a refund from your surveyor. The real line is six feet your way. My wifes garden has been on our land for forty-six years, and part of your fence is on it now. Well let that go, neighbor to neighbor, if you leave June’s tomatoes be.
He went very quiet, and then very polite. There is no pool going in on that strip, because that strip was never his.
Ill get my six feet one way or the other, Brad had said. He got his answer instead, from a brass marker June and I protected under her birdbath in 1979. Her garden gets me up some mornings. It is the only thing that does. And it is staying, every tomato and sunflower of it, exactly where she planted it.