Once, when I was a kid, my father got into a years-long feud with one of our neighbors over — I kid you not — a pile of dirt.
The neighbor in question was a widow who lived across the street from us and had a reputation for being irrationally mean. My folks have told me many times how she used to chase her children around her front yard, beating them with a broom; obviously, this was in those bygone libertarian days before the government was empowered to send out its Welfaremobiles to collect unfortunate children. In any event, the grown-ups on my street did their best to avoid confrontations with her, and I — who at some point had started thinking of her as “The Crazy Lady” — avoided her altogether.

The Great Dirt-Pile Fracas actually began with a real-estate deal. There was an empty lot next door to The Crazy Lady’s place, a lot which belonged, as best as I can recall, to one of her in-laws. The in-law had never done anything with the land, and The Crazy Lady had somehow, over the years, come to think of it as hers.
Then my father bought it, and all hell broke loose.

I remember Dad and The Crazy Lady having a number of minor opening skirmishes over the property, with her apparently thinking that if she just presented her case shrilly enough, my dad would have an eye-opening epiphany, truly see the cosmic injustice of it all, and, in a fit of compassion for a poor widow-woman trying to make her way all alone in the cold world, hand over the deed with no further questions asked.

Needless to say, he did not accept her logic.

Also, being a consummate diplomat who doesn’t intimidate easily, he told her what she could do with her logic and her sob-stories. And then he forged ahead with his own plans to turn the lot into a pasture for my mom’s horses.

There was a bit of a lull in the war while Dad built a nice whiteboard fence across the front of the lot, cleaned up the trash that had accumulated over the years, and installed an electric “hot wire” around the perimeter to keep the horses contained. He finished his improvements by using his tractor’s grader attachment to level out the rutted, hillocky ground so the horses wouldn’t stumble… including the front strip between the whiteboard fence and the road. Which is when The Crazy Lady’s cherished pile of dirt comes into this tale.

This dirt-pile was nothing special. It wasn’t good top soil or rich, black compost, or even anything that The Crazy Lady had purchased or had shipped in. It was simply a heap of swept-up dust composed of the same inhospitable clay that underlies the whole damn town. And it was on our side of the property line, or at least most of it was. So Dad graded it out flat. And the conflict went to DefCon One.

The next thing we knew, we had a furious woman with a murderous, lunatic gleam in her eye pounding on our front door and shaking her fist in my mother’s face as she went off about how my father had no right to touch her possessions and she was going to see to it that he paid for his temerity and arrogance. Dad told The Crazy Lady to lower her hands, stop threatening his wife, and get the hell off his property before he carried her off himself. Crazy Lady told him what he could go do with himself, then stomped back across the street for home. Dad, now in a murderous rage of his own, followed her.

I could hear them shouting from inside our house. From across the street.

Someone called the police, and I imagine they came with some reluctance — as I said, The Crazy Lady had a reputation, and they’d been to her house to break up spats between her and various neighbors before. In the end, the officer used the pencil that came with his service notebook to mark a line down the middle of the fencepost in the corner closest to her driveway. The Crazy Lady was told to stay on her side of that property line from now on, or the officer would come back and arrest her. My father was given the same warning. And at that, the shooting war became a cold war that stretched out over years, with the two superpowers of my neighborhood — my father and The Crazy Lady — exchanging dirty looks whenever they saw each other and playing childish games of throwing weeds and trash over the fenceline when they didn’t…

To be continued…