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If
you live in Central Texas above the Balcones Fault, you live on Limestone.
Some places are more or less eroded. But there is little soil anywhere.
Even Dachshunds have trouble finding a place to bury a bone. You live
on rock with a thin coating of soil. You don’t dig a garden here.
You pile up rocks or landscape timbers and make raised beds for your
plants. Some people actually chip and drill and manage to make holes
for fence post. I gave it up after one try. I enclose the bottom of
fence post in cement or prop them up with other cedar posts. Plants
have to love alkaline soils to do well here. You don’t see pines,
azaleas, or camellias unless someone really likes a gardening challenge.
Juniper, live oak, cedar elm, mexican persimmon, and hackberry all love
these rocky slopes, and stick their roots into and around limestone,
even working into the larger spaces that we call caves.
1991
Owning
the Land
A
few years ago my brother had a place on lake Cherokee close to Longview.
Had? Well, he had a lease on it, a long-term lease, one he could sell.
But he couldn't own the place outright. I thought at the time that that
was too bad. But he seemed to be able to do anything on his land he
wanted to, build, plant, etc. I thought at the time what a strange concept
this was, that we could own land. I've thought a lot about that since
that time, this whole idea of owning land is rather odd, and with the
land you get the plants, and animals and water and rocks and sometimes
the minerals. I was showing some of my friends around "my"
ten acres a couple of weeks ago, and Jim Sherow, an evironmental historian,
asked me if I really owned the land. I answered him rather flippantly
at the time that if working on it meant that I owned it, then I did.
But of course that is not the way land ownership is. I own forty-five
acres in New Mexico legally and haven't been on it since I started paying
for it. I have paid it off. And so it is mine. I have a title to it.
But this ten acres is only partly mine though I live and work on it.
The credit union has my mortgage. If I don't keep paying them each month,
it won't be "mine" for long. But as a grammarian, I understand
that there are many different concepts embodied in the genitive case
in English. I have an arm. It is "my" arm. But strangely it
is part of the "my.” It seems to possess itself. And then
there is "my" walk. I have a way of walking that is mine,
like a chicken my wife says. And I have an idea. "My" idea—does
that mean that no one else shares it? Do I have to record it before
it is mine alone, but then if someone else reads it is it his idea.
Does possession mean no one else owns it, too. Isn't "my"
student someone else's son, husband, and friend. Isn't my land a part
of someone else's Hays County, Central Texas, State, and nation. If
I let Jim Sherow walk across it and cut firewood, is it his, too.
But
I am not completely free in my use of the land. Even if I wanted to,
I couldn't grow cotton or marijuana on it. I have to follow county codes
on waste disposal. I have to follow codes on how close to adjoining
land I can build. I am sure there are lots of other restriction I know
nothing about. I don't hunt so I don't know what animals I could or
couldn't shoot and when or with what. I can't pen them up either in
a small fence. But if I put a fence around all my land and they happened
to be inside, I doubt that I would be responsible. But I can feed wild
animals, overfeed them, tame them, have them eating out of my hand literally
and legally.
Yes, I have
a piece of paper that says that when I have paid off my loan, I will
get a clear title. So then the land will be mine, clearly.
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