Our daughter, Molly, was twenty-eight and teaching elementary school two states away. She talked to both of us, which was more generosity than either of us had earned during the last year of the marriage. When I told her I intended to buy an old farm near a lake, she asked whether I knew how to run one. I told her I had watched enough roof repairs to understand the difference between a house that needed work and a house that could not be saved. She said that was not the same question, but she sounded relieved to hear me interested in something again.
Morrison Ranch had a weathered white farmhouse with green shutters, a red barn missing several roof panels, two former hay fields, and a narrow private dock. An old windbreak of pine and oak screened the place from the newer homes around the eastern shore. The auction photographs had shown peeling paint and weeds tall enough to hide a bicycle, but they had also shown a wide porch facing open water. I could picture a repaired railing, coffee at sunrise, and a kitchen table large enough for Molly to spread out her school projects whenever she visited.
I did not buy it because I assumed an auction automatically made the title perfect. Before bidding, I paid a title company to review the chain of ownership, examined the bankruptcy court's sale order with a local closing attorney, and studied the county's subdivision maps. The property had once belonged to the Morrison family, whose cattle operation had gradually failed after several bad years and expensive medical bills. Their bankruptcy estate was selling the parcel as a single unit. I read the legal description twice, then a third time after noticing that the adjacent Lake View Estates subdivision appeared on the map like a small rectangle pressed against the old ranch boundary.
The subdivision had twelve residential lots and a private access road. Morrison Ranch was not one of those lots, did not use that road for access, and had its own recorded parcel number and fifty-year-old driveway easement to the county highway. Its deed contained no promise to join an association, and the current title search found no recorded declaration extending Lake View Estates covenants across the ranch boundary. The sale order settled the bankruptcy estate's interest, and the new deed was recorded after closing. I kept the court order, recorded deed, title commitment, and insurance policy together in a blue folder in my glove compartment.
That blue folder would become more useful than the toolbox I had bought for repairing the farmhouse. I did not know that yet. On the morning I drove out to take possession, I was thinking about where the well line might need insulation and whether the dock's northern piling could be repaired before winter. I had a thermos of coffee on the passenger seat and an old fishing rod in the back. It had belonged to my father, who had never owned a lakefront acre but had spent his happiest Saturdays standing on somebody else's bank.