The man at the old governors records line said, Mrs. Nyberg, you said the swap in 1972. I did not think anyone still alive knew about that. Your Arne did a good thing once, and it is about to pay him back.
I told him about the DNR man and his tape measure, the forty feet onto state land, the sixty days to vacate.
In 1972, he said, the state and your husband did a recorded land swap. Arne gave the state a strip of good timber up the road that they wanted for the forest, and in exchange the state deeded him the shoreline his cabin sits on, clean and legal. The DNR is reading a survey that predates the swap. The swap is recorded. The land is yours.
The paper rolled up inside Arnes very first duck decoy was the survey from that swap, state seal and all.
They told me I never actually owned the last place my husband was happy, and he had sealed the proof inside a wooden mallard in 1971.
The records office sent the DNR the 1972 swap, and the notice came off my porch post the following week. The cabin was never forty feet onto anything but our own shoreline.
I still spend every summer at the cabin on Long Lake. The woodstove still works. Arnes decoys still line the mantel, and the one that rattled I keep right in the middle, because it turned out to be holding the whole place together.