A Blizzard Trapped Me in a Line Cabin With the Neighbor I’d Been Suing for Twelve Years

“About the creek? Maybe,” I said. “About everything else? Not really.”

On the third morning, the wind finally stopped. The sun came up over a world so white it hurt to look at.

We stood in the doorway with our tin cups of coffee, looking down at Silver Creek, buried under the snow.

“There’s enough water in that snow for both ranches for two years,” Ingrid said.

“There always has been,” I said. “If we’d just share it.”

In May, we fired both attorneys.

We hired a mediator instead and wrote a water-sharing agreement at Ingrid’s kitchen table in one afternoon. It’s four pages long. The lawsuit file was eleven boxes.

The judge who signed off on it laughed out loud in the courtroom.

Now, every Sunday, Ingrid and I ride up to the headgate together to check the flow. Then we ride back to one ranch or the other for supper.

Some weeks, we ride up there on Wednesdays too, though the water doesn’t really need checking that often.

My neighbors say I’m a changed man.

I’d say I just stopped being an idiot.

Have you ever been in a feud you wish you could take back? With a neighbor, a sibling, an old friend? Tell me about it in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late.