6. Assorted extension cords (4)
Items are held in secure storage by Ferrell Property Compliance, LLC, and may be reclaimed upon payment of removal and storage fees ($640.00) and estimated Association power restitution ($1,212.00), for a total of $1,852.00. Storage fees accrue at $35.00 per day.
It was signed Glenda Ashworth, President, on behalf of the Board, in the round, confident handwriting of a woman who had been signing things on behalf of the Board for nine years.
I read it twice standing in the driveway with my overnight bag still on my shoulder. Then I walked through the gate.
My back patio is a covered slab about twenty feet by fourteen, and I'd built it out the way some people build out a den. Ceiling fan. A string of warm white bulbs. A cedar counter I'd made from a pile of fence pickets. Against the house wall, under the counter, I'd had a stainless outdoor fridge for drinks, and at the end, on a pair of pavers to keep it off the slab, a white chest freezer that held, among other things, most of a white-tailed doe my neighbor Ozzie Stanek had taken in Mason County the previous November and processed with me on that very counter. The smoker sat by the post. The pressure washer lived under a tarp by the hose bib. And the mower, my pride, a battery zero-turn I'd bought the spring before, lived under the eave on the west side of the house, plugged into the outlet I'd had put there for that purpose.
All of it was gone. What was left were the shapes. A clean rectangle on the slab where the freezer had kept the dust off. Four rust rings where the smoker's feet had been. The outdoor GFCI outlets were standing open with their little weatherproof covers flipped up, empty, like mouths.
Splice had come out of the dog door behind me, stiff in the back legs, and he walked to the clean rectangle where the freezer had been and sniffed it, and then he looked up at me, and his tail went down.
"Yeah," I said. "I know, bud."
I'm going to tell you what I did next, because I think it matters, and because I've had a lot of time since then to be proud of it and a little embarrassed about it at the same time. I did not go over to Glenda Ashworth's house. I did not call her. I did not put anything on the neighborhood social page, where, I would learn later, Glenda had already put something of her own.
I went inside, and I went into the utility room off the garage, and I looked at my batteries.
That probably sounds strange. But I spent thirty-one years as a lineworker, most of them climbing poles and working energized lines for the Blanco Ridge Electric Cooperative, and the habit of checking the system before you check anything else goes so deep in me it might as well be in the bone marrow. Before you touch anything, you know what's live. So I stood in front of my inverters and read the little screens, and the system told me what it always told me, which was that it was fine. State of charge, ninety-four percent. Solar input, eleven point two kilowatts, which is about right for four in the afternoon in September. House load, eight hundred and forty watts: the fridge, the mini-splits idling, the router, the heat pump water heater taking a sip. Nothing missing, nothing tripped, nothing that didn't belong.
Only then did I go back outside, and find Ozzie already coming across the side yard from his place, holding his phone out in front of him like a man carrying a hot dish.