"Got a complaint," he said. "Anonymous. Said you were cultivating a controlled substance in violation of the county land-use ordinance. Now, that's really a law enforcement thing, not me, but they said something about agricultural use in a residential zone, so they kicked it to me, and here I am." He squinted past me at the kenaf. "Huh. Can I go look?"
"Please."
He walked down the length of the bed slowly, his clipboard under one arm. He rubbed a leaf between his thumb and forefinger, tilted his head back to look at a flower, and laughed out loud.
"Kenaf," he said. "Well, I'll be damned. My uncle tried to grow this for cattle feed down by Nampa in about 1984. The cows liked it fine. He just couldn't find anybody to buy it." He turned back to me. "What are you doing with it?"
I took him into the garage and showed him: the drying sheets on their felts, the stack of finished paper, the beater I'd built out of a modified garbage disposal and a lot of hope. He picked up a sheet and held it up to the light, the way you're supposed to, so he could see the fibers and the soft cloudy formation.
"That's beautiful," he said. He sounded surprised.
"Take it," I said. "Please. Take a few."
He hesitated, because he was a county employee and there were rules, and then he said, "My wife does calligraphy." He took three. He wrote on his form, in neat block letters, NO VIOLATION FOUND. ORNAMENTAL/FIBER PLANT (KENAF). NOT A CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE. NOT COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE. He gave me a copy. I put it in an acid-free folder in a banker's box in my office, where I had started keeping every letter Darlene had sent me, in date order, with a typed index on top.
"That's a nice filing system," Lyle said, looking at it.
"Occupational hazard."
"Keep doing it," he said. He looked out the window toward the Fisk deck. "I've done this job twenty-two years. The ones who measure your plants with a pole, they don't usually stop at the plants."
He was the second person to tell me that in a month. I put his card in the folder too.