All this flashed through my mind between the crackle and hiss of the bacon frying in the morning. It was kind like dream time. When you are in dream time it seems like hours have gone by, but when you check the clock, it has just been a couple of minutes.
This whole trip down memory lane had been precipitated by an offer on the Home Place from the power company. A mile or so up the road from our place, the road took a little joggle and when it recovered it's senses it was eighty feet to the West of where it had been.
Snuggled right up in that joggle was a power station. Been there forever. Also seemed that someone was always going straight instead of joggling and taking down the power lines. Didn't do a heck of a lot of good for the driver either.
So a couple of things were going to happen sort of all at once. The State Department of Highways wanted to straighten out the road for a couple of reasons. Back at the turn of the century when they were logging off the old growth, they would hold the logs in a holding pond up the stream from where we were located, and when the Spring flood came they would release the logs to ride the flood down to the lake. That made the stream a navigable waterway. Most of the summer you could not even "navigate" an air mattress down the stream without a lot of portaging.
The highway crossed a gully right where the main stream intersected the little rivulet from our property, and the road occasionally washed out. But because it was a navigable waterway, the DOH could not impeded or otherwise interfere with its natural flow. By moving the road eighty feet East they would eliminate that whole problem. But that meant that the Substation needed to go. It also meant that the main house, the barn, chicken coupe, hog pen and milking parlor had to go. The proposal was that the State of Pandemonium would condemn the buildings and buy the westernmost five acres of land, and then the Power Company would buy the rest of the section, put the new and improved power station on the South west corner and leave the rest as nature preserve to get green credits to offset whatever nasty shit they were pulling somewhere else.
I was all in favor of taking the offer, but Sis was having a considerable trouble turning loose.
It was HOME, it was the FAMILY CASTLE, it was our LEGACY, wrote all large on the Earth. But neither of us was going to drop our lives out here on the coast and move back there to manage the place. As far as the State seizing the property, there was nothing that could be done. The property was going to be condemned in the interest of "The greater Good". That's a term the Government uses when they are about to screw you. Just relax and think of the greater good while we screw you. There was enough of the hard headed Irishman in me to want to bow my neck and dig in my feet, futile as that might be. But I was reminded of the cartoon I saw of the little mouse standing there giving the owl the finger right before he became a former mouse.
The letter from out Attorney had come in the mail the day before. laying out all the details. It all looked all legal and proper. I couldn't see any reason in delaying the inevitable, so I called my sister to set up the trip.
"Oh Pat, I can't see how you can be all so calm and unemotional. This is THE HOME PLACE". the way she said it, it sounded all in capital letters, too.
"Lizzard Breath, we've been over this a bunch of times, so drop the hystreonics. It's business and we don't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. I'll pick you up in the morning about 8:00"
"EIGHT? That's like the middle of the night I don't even get up that early when I go to work."
"Well. that's the time your transportation leaves, and if you don't want to walk, take the bus or charter a small plane, you had best be ready. And dress warm. Probably nothing will go wrong, but it's best to be prepared."
