"I know a cottage whose door for me always stands ajar, and where the dwellers therein start with gladness when they hear the coming of my footsteps."
-Elbert Hubbard
Driving through the gates of Wyldswood is always a liberating moment for P and me. Through P's "sentry pines" the house comes into view in the distance, while cattle ponder our return through the barbed wire and Gus and O.G. honk and flap in unnerving welcome.
"Olly olly oxen free", Peg will announce as the world and all its troubles disappear behind us. We've arrived on base. We're safe. We're home.
But it's the traverse to get to that base we now need to address, because the last few hundred yards are pretty menacing.
You see, Wyldswood doesn't front a street; it's basically landlocked with a couple easements that provide access to the outside world.
Our quarter-mile panhandle to the west leads out to Golf Course Road, a somewhat upscale neighborhood by TayCo standards. But that little appendix to the north is the path we use more regularly, leading out to our mailbox on Pine Bluff Road. And no one would mistake the cluster of trailers on either side of the path for the entrance to a country club.
I'm sure they're nice folks--we've met one neighbor, in fact, who told us he's roamed what is now our farm since he was a little boy. His pit bulls still do. Those were probably his old bicycles half-buried in the mud of what's now the pond when P first came upon the place two decades ago.
But nice as he may be, his truck poses a touch of menace, with its middle finger greeting almost covering the rear window.
It's only slightly less off-putting this time of year, when he festoons the tired old Ford with Christmas lights.
Merry Christmas, No Trespassing, Beware of the Dog, and F*ck You. One gets whiplash at the messaging.
On the other side of the path stand the crumbling remains of a green, corrugated metal wall, behind which live what we surmise to be a cabal of unlicensed pharmaceutical reps, guarded by dozens of ferocious dogs who bark and howl insanely twice a day at mealtime, and whose excrement wafts a cloud of processed Alpo fumes across the farm when the wind shifts around to the west. It makes one long for the aroma of the paper mill on the other side.
All of this is bad for the wedding venue business, creates a first impression that a one-time visitor may be unable to overcome as guests arrive to celebrate some young couple's nuptials.
So a few days ago we took to hacking our way back to Golf Course Road, clearing our panhandle and planning for gates and signs and such for the improved entrance.
The easement was last cleared thoroughly during the pandemic, when P had a tractor and time on her hands. Lately we just got busy, spent lots of time away, and the surrounding jungle began its steady encroachment. This worried me as a lawyer--there's a legal doctrine called "abandonment" that allows a landowner to treat an easement as terminated if it's not used and maintained for a period of years. There's nothing more Southern than figuring out a way to steal a neighbor's land---just ask the Cherokee--and I didn't want to give an unscrupulous neighbor an excuse to stride into court and declare our lifeline to Golf Course Road void and of no force and effect.
Which had us, one unusually warm fall afternoon, out there with limb loppers, chopping and snipping our way back from the road to the pasture gate. Peg had tried to bush hog the drive, but ran over some cable half-buried and left behind from when an old homesite stood out there decades ago. The cable wrapped smartly around the blades, and the big mower ground to a halt.
I was out there the following morning, stomping through brush in the hopes of scaring off the rattlers and moccasins that were probably out there wishing I'd go away, pulling long stretches of steel cable out of the vines and tossing them into the bed of the Dodge. Then I started lopping branches, which brought Peg into the process so she could point out everywhere her lazy husband left behind a little too much brush and foliage for her liking. My life's mantra, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," has never been hers.
Once the gate was cleared, we worked our way back toward the farm, flushing some wild turkeys along the way.
And yes, it was that overgrown.
P and I took turns lopping and dragging branches to the bed of the truck, eventually creating a pile a good bit taller than the cab. Late in the process, arms feeling like they were made of cement from all the cutting above my head, I proved the immutability of Newton's Law and freed a large branch to drop with a crunch onto my upper lip, leaving a bloody sore that probably started rumors of domestic violence or a social disease at the Elks Lodge that night.
That Peg was right there with me, straining and cutting and soaked in sweat, called me up short in a way. This is what love looks like, every bit as much as whatever romantic notions we carry around. This tough, beautiful woman, out toiling beside me in the heat, was suddenly the loveliest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Wishing I'd snapped a picture of it, but P just would've made me delete it.
Eventually our mass of branches and cable ended up in the debris pile next to the new pole barn, an eyesore we'll have to address soon enough. Now that the easement's reopened, we've driven down it a few times to fend off some nascent legal challenge to its existence, and are planning a sign to mark the entrance to Wyldswood from Golf Course Road.
And we dragged around a souvenir of our clearing project for days afterward, a skein of branches that wrapped around the rear axle of the Dodge. You can see it down there under the bumper, as we were leaving Winn Dixie the other morning.
Funny that I managed to cut the cable from around the mower blades and shaft, but couldn't free the axle of our truck from those tree trimmings. The flora at Wyldswood are tough as everything else in Taylor County, I reckon.
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