I read that letter twice at the kitchen table, the accordion folder open beside my coffee cup. Then I called Patricia.
She was quiet for a moment after I read her the relevant section. "He's arguing prescriptive easement," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"That's going to be a problem for him," she said. "Because prescriptive easement requires open, continuous, hostile use without the owner's permission. They've been operating under a recorded easement agreement, which means their use was permissive, not hostile. You can't ripen a permissive use into a prescriptive easement. The courts have been consistent on that for decades."
I told her I had thought something along those lines.
"More importantly," she said, "they haven't been maintaining it. You have. That's going to matter."
She was right about that. I had the records to prove it: every service call, every parts invoice, every maintenance log I had kept in a spiral-bound notebook since 1991, the year I took over the system from my father. The notebooks were in a cardboard box on the shelf above the filing cabinet: 31 years of handwritten entries in the same mechanical pencil I had used since technical college, each one dated and initialed, each one describing the work performed, the materials used, and the condition of the system before and after.
I had not kept those records because I anticipated a legal dispute. I had kept them because my grandfather had taught my father that a system you cannot account for is a system you do not understand, and my father had taught me the same thing, and it had simply become the way I worked.