The next morning I got up, got dressed, dug down into the pot of Stans lemon tree with a garden trowel, and lifted out the little lockbox he buried there in 2015, and took the paper inside it to an elder-law attorney in Phoenix, and the private equity men from Scottsdale never measured my patio again.
The new owner had come with a clipboard and a tape measure and told me the old buy-in contracts did not transfer to the new ownership, that I would have to move to the memory-care wing or out, that my lemon tree was a liability, that theyd have the unit cleared by summer.
He was counting on me not having read my own contract as carefully as Stan did.
When we paid our two-hundred-thousand-dollar buy-in in 2015, my husband did not trust a brochure that promised wed never move again, so he made the original owner sign a binding, recorded addendum guaranteeing our residency and the return of our buy-in for life, a contract that legally runs with the property no matter who buys it.
Stan was a careful man. The brochure said one thing, but Stan knew a brochure is not a contract, so he sat the original owner down and got it in writing, recorded and notarized, that our right to live there and our buy-in were protected against any future sale. Then he sealed a copy in a lockbox and hid it in the lemon tree pot, and told me the day would come.
The attorney read it and said the new owners lawyers were simply wrong. A recorded covenant like that does transfer. It binds them whether they like it or not. They could convert every other wing to luxury units, but they could not move me, and they owed me my buy-in protection to the letter.
When the owner came back, I handed him the recorded addendum and I said, your lawyers told you the old contracts dont transfer. My husband made sure this one does. I am staying, in this unit, on the terms we paid for, and the lemon tree stays too. You might have your lawyers actually read the county records this time.
They did. They were not happy, but the law was the law. I kept my apartment, my patio, and Stans lemon tree, which has survived two Arizona summers and now a private equity firm.
That lemon tree is a liability, the man had said. That lemon tree was hiding the one paper that saved my home. Stan planted it our first year and hid our protection in its roots, because he knew that someday somebody would come with a tape measure, and he wanted his wife to have more than a brochure to stand on. He gave me a recorded contract, and a lemon tree, and both are still bearing fruit.