May 2006
May began with rain—relentless, saturating rain that seemed determined to seep into every part of the farm. The ground was so waterlogged that mud puddles replaced whole patches of grass. Even the alpacas were irritated. We let them out to graze along the hillside, and they bunched together, annoyed, lifting their feet like the earth itself had turned against them.
One afternoon, Dad’s cousin Scott showed up with his young nephew. The second he stepped out of his vehicle, we knew something was wrong. He carried the kind of look people wear when they’ve witnessed something ugly and didn’t have time to prepare for it.
“I met your neighbor on the way up here,” he said.
My stomach dropped—there was that now-familiar clench of anxiety, that “what now?” dread. Dad’s voice was flat, resigned. “What did he do?”
Scott explained that when he approached the bottom of the right-of-way, Dale stepped into the path of his car and motioned for him to roll down the window. Scott simply asked whether he was headed the right way. Dale confirmed he was—but then immediately launched into a red-faced tirade, voice high-pitched, cussing out my dad like he’d been storing up the venom for weeks. Scott told him not to talk like that around his nephew, and Dale turned and walked away as if nothing had happened.
My dad shook his head in embarrassment; my mom shifted from anxious to angry. “This is what we have to deal with,” she muttered, arms crossed. We apologized to Scott, embarrassed but unsurprised. We warned him: “If he’s still out there, keep your windows up and don’t look at him.”
After Scott left, the three of us stood there in the mud and came to the same quiet, heavy conclusion—we couldn’t keep living like this. Not with Dale erupting whenever he felt like it, not with random confrontations that could turn dangerous without warning.
Surrender
A few days later, the gas company called. They needed another easement on our land to build a new road for a drilling site. As my dad talked with them, something shifted—an idea began to take shape. By the time he hung up, he was wearing the expression of a man who had just discovered a way out of a maze.
What if we connected the farm to that new easement?
What if we built an alternate road?
What if we no longer had to drive past Dale at all?
My dad shared the idea with my mom and me, almost proudly. The mood in the room shifted from fatigue to curiosity. It was doable. We’d need to talk to the neighbor beside the Eagles about buying a small strip of property, but it would work. And it made more sense than clinging to the right-of-way—something my family had used for eighty years but which had become more symbolic than functional. After all, we’d already let go of the old smokehouse, the outhouse, even redesigned the farmhouse. If we could release those pieces of history, we could release this too.
For me, there was a tinge of ego about giving up the right-of-way—it felt like surrender. But my concern for my parents outweighed everything. And for Dad, it felt like a blessing—an answer to prayer arriving through a gas company survey map.
In less than an hour of discussion, the why became clear.
We were trying to build something—an alpaca business with plans for boarding barns, a birthing barn, and a small store selling fleece products. But how could we invite customers to a place where the neighbor might stop them, curse them out, or worse? Even if the court granted us a prescriptive easement, Dale wasn’t going to stop. He’d escalated from vandalism to poisoning ducks to a full-blown public altercation at the post office. Harassing visiting family was just the latest in a long pattern.
More than anything, we were tired.
Tired of watching the animals.
Tired of wondering what Dale might do next.
Tired of listening for footsteps, engines, or voices at the bottom of the hill.
Living under threat every day had worn us down.
So we made the decision: we would give up the right-of-way and build a new road.
Dad called the gas company. They agreed: in exchange for the easement they needed, they would bulldoze a new road to connect our farm to their fresh access route. They told us they could start work as soon as the rain stopped. For a moment, hope felt tangible.
In Between the Rain
Life didn’t pause in the meantime. Finals week meant my mornings and evenings were devoted to studying and finishing my senior seminar paper. Afternoons were for farm work. Dad and I cleaned out the wash house. The cellar beneath it was musty, filled with that damp-basement smell, and shelves lined with canned food from the 1990s. The jars held settled layers of green and dark yellow liquid. The lids were rusty but mostly intact. We made a game out of throwing them out without getting any of the gook on us.
Dad also managed to resurrect the weed eater—one of those expensive gas-powered ones that had died the previous summer. All it needed was a spark plug. When it roared to life, it felt like a small but meaningful victory in a month full of setbacks. After trimming around the steps, I pressure-washed the vinyl siding, watching months of dirt wash away into the muddy yard.
But the relief didn’t last.
Tuesday, May 9th
While my mom and I were visiting a relative at her hair salon, my dad walked in with a strained look. He asked if I’d go home immediately. On his way out earlier, he had passed Dale and his wife working in their garden. Dale had stared him down—mean, intense, like a boxer at a weigh-in—hunched forward and predatory. It was the first direct sign of confrontation since the post office fight, and Dad’s instincts kicked in. Something was coming.
I drove home and waited on the farm, alternating between feeling safe on our own land and feeling like a sitting duck. For as beautiful as the place was, danger always seemed to hover somewhere at the edges.
The rest of the day I finished my paper and went to the gym. It was sunny and in the high seventies—one of those early summer days that almost convince you everything is normal. After lifting, I ran sprints on the artificial turf at Bridgeport High School, the soft texture of the field an easy cushion on my calves.
Later that night, we turned on the local evening news. Two separate shootings dominated the headlines—one involving a substitute teacher who shot his neighbors, and another about a man who kidnapped the people living next door, dragged them into the woods, and executed them. The stories were horrific, almost surreal in their brutality.
I remember sitting there thinking the same thing most people probably think when they hear news like that: those kinds of things happen to other families, in other towns, far from your own life. They don’t happen to you. Not here. Not to us.
Wednesday, May 10th
I turned in my paper and spent the rest of the day studying Spanish. This semester felt like a personal milestone for me. I’d always struggled with Spanish—getting overwhelmed and dropping it—but this time I stayed with it. Fought through the fear. Did well. It felt like overcoming something deeper than just a class.
That evening was our last church membership class at South Ridge. The church had grown so quickly over the past year that membership felt like an anchor—a commitment to community and accountability. The class concluded with testimonies from me, my parents, and Pastor Seth. My mom and I shared ours first—simple and straightforward. But my dad saved his for last.
He spoke calmly, in that steady fatherly tone he always used. He told us how his biological mother left him on the front porch when he was five. She told him, “You wait here. I’ll be right back,” walked up the steps, got into a taxi, and disappeared forever. I had never heard that story—not once in thirty-one years. What stunned me was not just the story itself, but the way he told it: no bitterness, no tremor. As if forgiveness had washed the pain away completely.
My mom gave him a hug afterward—she was always a hugger—and something tightened in my chest. I realized how much his past explained the man he had been before becoming a Christian: the anger, the drinking, the broken things around the house. And how miraculous his transformation really was. Christ had changed him in a way I couldn’t deny. In Ezekiel 36:26, God says that he would give a new heart and put a new spirit in us; That He would remove from our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. God did that to my dad.
Thursday, May 11th
I woke early, reviewed for my Spanish exam, and took the test at 10 a.m. It was easier than expected. By the time I drove home, the weather had turned. A wall of dark clouds rolled in, and the sky opened with the hardest rain we’d had in months. Water raced down the driveway; creeks swelled high. The wind cut sharply as temperatures dropped into the fifties. I took a nap, exhausted.
I spent the rest of the day studying for my Marketing exam—a class where no amount of studying could guarantee more than a C. The frustration was real.
Later that evening, I walked into the living room and found my mom and dad sitting together on the futon. I must have been wearing some kind of goofy grin, because my mom looked up at me and asked, “What’s so funny?”
I shrugged and said, “Oh, you two are adorable sitting there together.”
And they were.
Over the past six months, I had watched them face more adversity than most couples deal with in years. Yet through every confrontation, every late-night worry, every new problem thrown at us, they leaned on each other. My mom depended on my dad’s calm, steady way of approaching things; my dad depended on my mom’s nurturing spirit and her determination to see the good even when life felt dark. Their faith had grown, and it showed—not in some dramatic way, but in the quiet, humble way they handled conflict, owned their mistakes, and prayed together.
They were still very much in love, the kind of love that deepens with age and hardship. Seeing them there on that futon, content and at peace, made something ache inside me—not with sadness, but with longing. I hoped that one day I’d have a marriage like theirs. A partnership that could withstand storms and still choose tenderness at the end of the day.
Watching them grow old together, side by side, was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
Friday, May 12th
At 10:37 a.m., I officially finished Spring Semester 2006. My last exam—State and Local Government—was complete. Relief washed over me, not because of academics but because I could finally focus on everything happening at home.
I spent the afternoon scanning my notes and saving them to disk. I never sold my textbooks back—why give the bookstore a $150 book for $10 just so they could sell it used for $120? No thanks.
My parents left that afternoon for an out-of-state alpaca show. They weren’t showing animals—just networking and researching a shearing board. If we could shear our own animals, we could save money and maybe even offer services to others. They planned to be home Saturday evening.
Saturday, May 13th
The day brought new life. In the duck barn—our “Hilton”—I found three new ducklings. I carried them inside to the wooden incubator, a small box lined with a towel and warmed by a steady light. One bowl held feed; another held water the ducklings insisted on splashing in. We’d lost many ducks over the winter, so their arrival felt like hope.
It was my first real day of vacation. I slept until 10 a.m., washed clothes, did dishes, and continued scanning my notes. My next project was converting VHS tapes—mostly my brother’s football games and old videos I’d recorded in high school—into DVDs. With my parents gone, I spent the day alone with the animals. Even Montana, the alpha alpaca who was affectionate on his own terms, let me pet him. That had never happened without Dad around.
I spent some time working on a small project for church. The Da Vinci Code movie was coming out the following Friday, and since the book claimed Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married—along with several other fictitious ideas—South Ridge Church wanted to use the upcoming Sunday as a chance to address questions people might bring with them.
I’d been asked to create a short 30–45 second intro video for the Q&A session. It felt good to work on something clear and purposeful, something rooted in truth rather than the chaos we were dealing with at home. I finished the video that evening, exported it, and got it ready for review.
Mom and dad would get home later than expected. This time I had all of the chores done and the animals put up for the night. They were able to relax and get ready for bed without any interruptions.
Sunday, May 14th
Mother’s Day was a good day. We went to church together for the first time in a while. The worship team practiced Chris Tomlin songs—“How Great Is Our God,” “Your Grace Is Enough”—and the room seemed to wake up as soon as the music began. Afterward we handed out flowers to all the moms, and my mom continued giving random hugs. We grabbed Arby’s for lunch. I gave her two cards—one from me, one from Dad. She loved them both.
Later I drove to East/West Field in Fairmont, an old stone-walled stadium reminiscent of George Daniel Field in Lorain. The track had been redone, perfect for sprinting. My dad used to play football there, and I asked him later to show me the running route he’d done back in high school. He smiled—a proud, amused smile—and said, “Sure! We should try and run it.”
The rest of the afternoon, we worked side by side making plans to install a new water line and talking through ways to reroute the creeks to prevent further erosion on the hillside. But the conversation carried more weight than just another farm project. We had finally made the decision to cut ourselves off from Dale completely—no more shared access, no more loose ends tying our lives to his. Moving the water line would be a clean break. As we mapped it out, I also planned to call the cable company. If we ran the broadband line alongside the new water line, we could finally escape dial-up and bring the farm a little closer to the modern world. It felt like forward motion—protecting what was ours, tightening our boundaries.
Everything we were doing—water lines, broadband, the new road—was about one thing: severing the last ties to Dale.
Monday, May 15th
I got my final grades. Four A’s and one B—the B in Spanish. It put me on the Dean’s List, not the President’s List, and although I knew I’d done well, that B nagged at me.
I spent part of the day mowing the lawn near where we kept the ducks and geese. If weather held, I’d use the weed eater next. Since I’d made the Dean’s List, we planned to celebrate at Mi Pueblo, our local Mexican restaurant. I always ordered the #8: three hard-shell tacos with beans and rice. The place was family-owned; TVs everywhere showed different soccer games; the oldest son took orders with a portable phone hanging from his back pocket. They treated you like royalty.
But when we left for dinner, we found a tree branch laid across the right-of-way about fifty feet from our property line. It was one of the branches we’d cut during the ice storm in October—you could see the chainsaw marks. My mom’s voice trembled. Dad tensed up. They suggested turning back.
And something in me snapped.
Months of frustration, fear, and anger poured out. I raised my voice—like a coach rallying his team at halftime—and told them we weren’t letting that fruit loop ruin our night. We were celebrating. They hesitated, then agreed, and we drove on. By the time we settled into Mi Pueblo, the sounds of soccer games, sizzling plates, and friendly wait staff lifted our spirits back to normal.
Later we watched our usual sci-fi shows—The 4400, Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1 reruns—but my parents seemed distracted. As the night went on, the anxiety eased. I reassured them that once the new water line and road were in, everything would get better. It seemed to help. The rain began again, lightly at first, then steadily. It was a calm evening, the kind where frogs and crickets should have been singing if not for the weather.
Before bed, we hugged each other—just our normal “love you, goodnight, see you in the morning.” Nothing felt off. Nothing unusual. It had been a good day in spite of everything. A day worth remembering. A day that made us believe, even if briefly, that things would turn around.
We went to bed.
It was our last night together.