My Grandmother Left Me Her Vermont Maple Farm. My Cousin’s Lawyer Came to Take It Away, and Fell in Love With It Instead

My name is Owen Gallagher. I’m 43, and I make maple syrup on a mountain farm in northern Vermont.

Twelve thousand maple trees. A sugarhouse my great-grandfather built in 1921. A farmhouse with crooked floors and a woodstove that has never once gone out in winter.

It was my grandmother’s farm.

Grandma Rose ran it alone for thirty years after my grandfather died. She tapped trees until she was eighty-one. She drove a tractor until she was eighty-five. She beat me at cribbage every Sunday night until the week she died, at ninety-two.

I moved up here seven years ago, after my divorce and after I’d had enough of working in finance in Boston. I took care of the farm. I took care of her.

When she passed last year, her will left everything to me.

My cousin Derek was not happy about that.

Derek lives in Connecticut. He visited Grandma Rose twice in ten years, once to ask for money. He believed the farm was worth at least three million dollars, between the land, the timber and the sugarbush.

He hired a lawyer to contest the will. His claim was that I’d used “undue influence” on a confused old woman to cut him out.

Anyone who ever met Grandma Rose would have laughed at the idea that anybody could influence her into anything.

The lawyer called in February to schedule a site visit for the appraisal.

She arrived on the first warm day in March, right when the sap started running. The road was a river of mud.

She got out of her car in a long gray wool coat and black leather boots that sank immediately to the ankle.

“Mr. Gallagher,” she said, looking down at her ruined boots. “I’m Callie Brooks. I represent your cousin.”

“Welcome to mud season,” I said.

She looked up at me. Then she looked a second time.

“Oh,” she said. “Nobody told me.”

“Told you what?”

She turned bright red.

“Nothing,” she said. “Show me the farm.”