Back to the old town

So, mom and I were up in her home town yesterday, making the rounds, and had some great moments.

First, we were looking for a deadbeat tenant, someone who had walked away from a trailer parked on one of our lots. Like most single-wides, it's not too new, and won't win any beauty contests. We need to just haul the thing away, but to do that, we need title to it. This tenant has a couple of choices, she can sign over title to us, or she can go through a lengthy procedure whereby we force her to do so, which involves going to court, hiring a lawyer, paying fees, etc. As a bonus, my mom actually wrote the procedure for doing this, back in the late 80s-early 90s, when she was a very active member of the NC manufactured housing industry association.

So, we pull up into this driveway of a small, well-tended house which belonged to a woman with the same name as the mother of the renter. One of two with that name in town. It's November 27th, mind you, and this house has some very impressive and elaborate Xmas decorations out. There are a couple of trucks there and, as we parked, I saw back in the shed/barn structure that there's some old dude there wearing hunter's day-glo orange who's squatting down working on a small engine of some sort. Surprisingly, no dogs were barking.  Now, you'd think that if a couple of people you didn't know pulled up into your driveway, you'd go out to greet them to figure out what's up, no?  The guy doesn't budge. So I walk up to him and say:  "Does such and such live here?" and he says "Nope." Something like that, not much more. And I turn and walk off.  And I realized that, in my sport coat and khakis and white shirt, this was like something straight out of The Rockford Files, hunting down the renter on the lamb.

Later, mom and I paid a visit to the local rep of the NC Forestry Service. We're thinking about converting some undeveloped land into forest land.  We'd log it and get a little money out of that, but mostly we'd cut the taxes on the land by a factor of ten. So we're telling the guy where the tract we're thinking about is, and we say that it backs up to the farm of Johnny H.  "Oh, I know where that is," he allows, "when I was younger, I used to pick tobacco on that farm.  He had two mules that were so well-trained, we'd load up the cart and say 'go to the barn,' and the mule'd walk straight to the barn.  They'd unload the cart and say 'go to the field', and they'd go right back out there. And imagine what would happen if those two mules come up on  each other on that single track....."

Let's just say the guy could talk. We talked for a right good while, learned a lot of his medical history, we did.