PART2
I run four hundred and eighty acres of bluegrass cattle pasture and eighty acres of small thoroughbred operation in Woodford County, Kentucky.
The Pickwick family has been on this land since 1851, when my great-great-grandfather Granville Pickwick bought the original two hundred and fifty acres from a Lexington land office using the proceeds from a small Louisville tobacco brokerage.
Family history says he would not have bought the land without my great-great-grandmother Tabitha pushing him for ten straight years.
She had grown up on a small Bourbon County horse farm, and she wanted a piece of bluegrass of her own.
Not a house in town.
Not a rented pasture.
Land.
Something underfoot that no man could take back when moods changed or markets turned.
Granville listened eventually.
That was the first wise thing he did for this family.
The second was keeping it.
The Pickwicks have run cattle here for five generations.
We have buried men in suits and men in work shirts.
We have watched foals stand for the first time in the mist.
We have pulled calves during storms.
We have mended fence in heat, frost, and rain.
We have watched bluegrass turn from spring green to summer heavy to winter gray and back again so many times that the land has become less like property and more like a relative.
My father, also named Granville Pickwick, inherited the farm in 1971.
He ran it for thirty-seven years.
He died in 2008 from a sudden heart attack while moving the herd from the south pasture to the eastern grazing rotation.
That was the kind of death men like my father almost plan without meaning to.
No hospital bed.
No long speech.
Just boots in grass and work unfinished.
I inherited the operation the same year at forty-three.
By training, I am a veterinarian.
I went to Auburn for my doctorate of veterinary medicine in 1989 and spent twelve years running a large-animal practice out of Versailles, Kentucky.
Horses, cattle, emergencies at two in the morning, hands numb in February, shirts ruined in July.
That was my life.
Then my father’s stroke in 2003 pulled me back into farm management full-time.
I kept practicing for five more years.
After he died, the farm became the practice.
My wife, Sadie, is fifty-eight.
She runs a small farm-to-table restaurant in Midway called Pickwick’s Table.
Forty customers a service.
Three evenings a week.
No gimmicks.
No foam on plates.
No menu language requiring a dictionary.
She serves what Kentucky land gives honestly.
Cornbread.
Beef.
Beans.
Greens.
Peaches when the peaches are right.
She has never lost a reservation to a competitor in eleven seasons, and if you ask any food critic who has passed through central Kentucky in the last decade, they will tell you her cornbread is the best south of the Ohio River.
She met me at Auburn in 1986.
She was a hospitality management junior.
I was a first-year veterinary student.
She said I looked tired, hungry, and too serious for my own good.
She married me anyway.
We have two children.
Lincoln is thirty-two and runs the day-to-day cattle operation.
He is quiet like my father.
He can look across eighty acres and know which animal is off by half a step.
His wife, Estelle, teaches fourth grade in Frankfort.
Our daughter, Auden, is twenty-nine.
She is an agricultural attorney in Lexington.
She specializes in Kentucky farm family estate planning and agricultural property disputes.
She graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law in 2020.
She married Connor Burchard, a Bourbon County horseman, in 2022.
They have a son named Granville, after my father.
He is two and a half and already believes every frog on the farm is personally acquainted with him.
My mother, Genevieve Pickwick, is eighty-one.
She still lives in the original 1859 brick farmhouse my great-great-grandfather built.
She has lived there continuously since she married my father in 1962.
She still makes breakfast at 5:45 every morning.
She still walks the long loop around the north pasture at 6:30 in every kind of weather Kentucky offers.
She still serves on the Woodford County Bourbon Trail Heritage Commission.
She has been doing that since 1981, which means she has outlasted six county judges, three chairmen, two scandals, one failed branding campaign, and every woman who ever underestimated her because she wore gardening shoes to meetings.
That is my household.
That is my land.
And to the immediate east of that land sits Bourbon Springs Estates.
Twenty-six luxury homes built between 2018 and 2020 by a Louisville developer on land that used to be Donnelly Stud, a small thoroughbred breeding operation.
Average sale price, three point four million dollars.
HOA dues, twenty-eight thousand a year.
Stone gates.
Private roads.
Central plaza.
A clubhouse with copper gutters.
A wine room nobody needed.
And residents who had paid enough money to believe views were something the world owed them.
The president of the Bourbon Springs Estates Homeowners Association was Charity Whittington.
Charity had been writing me certified letters for three years.
The first one was almost polite.
It referenced “ambient agricultural concerns.”
That meant cattle smell.
The second referenced “early morning equipment noise.”
That meant hay cutting.
The third referenced “visual disruption along the eastern community edge.”
That meant my fence line.
By the fourth letter, she had started using phrases like “documented appraisal impact.”
By the eleventh letter, she threatened “escalating community legal action” unless I installed what she called a “visual screening barrier” along the entire eastern boundary at my own expense.
I replied to every letter.
Politely.
I attached Kentucky’s right-to-farm statute every time.
I explained, in the same two paragraphs, that two hundred and forty Angus cattle on agriculturally zoned land that had been in continuous agricultural use since before the Civil War was not a nuisance under Kentucky law.
It was the law’s favorite example of what agriculture is.
Charity did not appreciate this.
People like Charity believe a polite refusal is just an argument waiting to be improved with pressure.
She did not understand that I was raised by people who could say no and then go feed cattle without feeling the need to explain themselves again.
My father had received similar letters near the end of his life from the developer during the marketing phase of Bourbon Springs Estates.
My mother typed his replies while he dictated from the kitchen island.
In one of them, he wrote that the Pickwick farm and Bourbon Springs Estates would be sharing that corner of Woodford County for the next hundred years, and he would prefer that the sharing be civil.
He died before learning whether that would happen.
Standing there in April, looking at a luxury pool sitting inside my pasture, I had my answer.
No.
It would not be civil.
Not yet.
I called Auden at her office in Lexington at 11:00 a.m.
She answered on the second ring.
“Daddy?”
“There is a swimming pool in my pasture.”
There was a pause.
Not long.
Just long enough for my daughter, the lawyer, to decide whether she had heard me correctly.
“What kind of swimming pool?”
“The expensive kind.”
“Where?”
“Eastern boundary.”
“How far over?”
“Looks like six feet inside our line, maybe more.”
Another pause.
This one was colder.
“Do not touch anything.”
“I wasn’t planning to swim.”
“Daddy.”
“I won’t touch anything.”
“Send me the GPS coordinates.”
I sent them from my phone.
She called back at 1:14 p.m.
“Daddy, Sven Borgman is on his way.”
Sven Borgman was the best boundary surveyor in central Kentucky.
He had been doing horse farm boundary work since 1988.
If a survey pin had been buried by three floods, two divorces, a barn fire, and one dishonest cousin, Sven could find it.
He arrived at 2:00 p.m. in a green Subaru with a survey rod, GPS receiver, and a small leather satchel.
He shook my hand.
He listened to me for two minutes.
Then he went to work.
He walked the eastern fence line for an hour.
He set GPS points at all four corners of the pool.
He set points at the recorded eastern boundary stone my father had set in 1971.
He set points at the southeast corner survey pin my grandfather had set in 1934.
He compared readings against the certified Woodford County plat from 1996.
At 3:30 p.m., he met me at the pasture gate.
“Mr. Pickwick,” he said, “the pool’s western edge sits six feet two inches inside your recorded boundary.”
I said nothing.
“The southern edge sits four feet eight inches inside.”
He looked back at the pool.
“The total area of the pool and travertine decking physically on your property is approximately four hundred and twelve square feet.”
I looked at him.
“That substantial?”
“That is not a marginal encroachment.”
He glanced once more at the Mediterranean tile.
“That is a substantial trespass by a permanent structure.”
“How long has it been there?”
Sven knelt and touched the edge of the grout near the decking.
“Based on curing, weathering, and the condition of the travertine, I would estimate between nine and fourteen months.”
“Summer of last year?”
“That would be my guess.”
I had not ridden that section of fence in the summer of 2024.
Lincoln had managed the eastern rotation that year.
The pool had been built during one of those windows where nothing about the herd required us to visit that precise corner.
The HOA had not made a mistake in daylight.
They had made one in confidence.
I called Auden back at 4:00.
I gave her Sven’s findings.
She did not sound surprised.
She sounded ready.
“Daddy, this is a clean Kentucky fixtures case.”
“Explain it to me like I’m a cattleman.”
“You are a cattleman.”
“Exactly.”
She took a breath.
“In Kentucky, when someone builds a permanent structure on private land without the landowner’s written consent, that structure generally becomes part of the real estate.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it belongs to the landowner.”
“The pool.”
“The pool.”
“The decking.”
“Yes.”
“The hot tub.”
“Yes.”
“The fountains.”
“Yes.”
“The lights.”
“Yes.”
“The filtration system.”
“Yes.”
I looked out over the pasture.
The water was still blue.
The cattle were still calm.
The world had shifted anyway.
“What is the right path?”
Auden went quiet.
That is something she gets from her mother.
She does not rush when something matters.
“Daddy, I want to think overnight.”
“The obvious move is quiet title?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“The obvious remedy would be demanding removal at their expense.”
“That sounds obvious.”
“It is also messy. It gives them eighteen months to hate you in court.”
“They already hate me.”
“Not at the level they will.”
I smiled despite myself.
“What is the better idea?”
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
She called at 7:00 a.m.
I was at the kitchen island with coffee.
Sadie was rolling biscuit dough near the sink.
Auden did not waste time.
“Daddy, I have the quiet move.”
Sadie looked up immediately.
She knows our daughter.
When Auden uses that tone, she has found the softest way to make something irreversible.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“We file quiet title and win fast under Kentucky fixtures doctrine.”
“All right.”
“Once title is confirmed, you do not demand removal.”
I frowned.
“No?”
“No.”
“What do I do?”
“You extend your cattle fence around it.”
Sadie stopped rolling dough.
Auden continued.
“You make the pool part of the eastern pasture.”
I said nothing.
“The HOA cannot stop you. It will be your structure on your land.”
Sadie’s eyes narrowed.
She was starting to understand.
“Then,” Auden said, “you drain the chemical system, disconnect anything not livestock-safe, replace the filtration with a cattle-grade water system drawing from your existing well, and convert the pool into a permanent water source for the herd.”
I sat there with my coffee halfway to my mouth.
“The HOA’s hundred-thousand-dollar luxury pool becomes my cattle’s water trough.”
“Legally, yes.”
Sadie turned toward the window.
For five seconds, her face remained perfectly still.
Then she laughed so hard she had to set the rolling pin down.
I did not laugh at first.
I was thinking.
That is the difference between revenge and structure.
Revenge acts fast because it wants the feeling.
Structure waits because it wants the result.
Auden was right.
If I demanded demolition, the HOA could turn it into a community martyr story.
Cruel farmer destroys neighborhood amenity.
Property values.
Children.
Recreation.
All the usual theater.
But if the pool became a lawful agricultural water source, it stopped being a disputed amenity and became farm infrastructure.
Kentucky law knows farm infrastructure.
Kentucky courts understand water for cattle better than they understand HOA feelings.
I took a slow drink of coffee.
“File it.”
Auden filed the quiet title action that Friday.
The complaint was calm.
That mattered.
It did not accuse Charity of evil.
It did not call the HOA arrogant.
It did not mention cattle drinking from infinity edges.
It simply identified the parcel, attached Sven’s survey, cited Kentucky fixtures doctrine, and requested declaration of ownership over the improvements built on the Pickwick parcel without consent.
Charity’s attorney answered with outrage disguised as legal argument.
The HOA had built the pool in good faith.
The HOA had relied on contractor surveys.
The HOA had invested community funds.
The HOA had intended the structure for member use.
None of that changed where the concrete sat.
That is the pleasant thing about land records.
They do not care about intentions after the boundary is crossed.
For six weeks, I continued doing what spring requires.
Calving.
Pasture rotation.
Fence repair.
Hoof checks for the thoroughbreds.
Vet calls I still took for old neighbors who trusted my hands more than they trusted younger men with newer trucks.
I rode the eastern fence line fourteen times during those weeks.
The pool sat behind a temporary orange construction barrier on the HOA side.
The barrier looked embarrassed.
It was too flimsy to stop a child, much less Kentucky property law.
Charity filed three procedural motions.
One argued the pool should be exempt from fixtures doctrine because it served a “public purpose.”
Auden’s response was eleven pages and sharp enough to shave with.
There is no public-purpose exception allowing a private HOA to build a luxury pool on agricultural land and keep ownership because it wishes it had not trespassed.
The court denied that motion in three sentences.
Another motion requested additional time to retain specialized land-use counsel.
Judge Tessa Carrington denied that too.
At the hearing, she looked over her glasses at Charity’s attorney and said, “Counsel, additional lawyers will not move the property line.”
I liked Judge Carrington immediately.
The quiet title order came on the third Tuesday of May.
It was unambiguous.
The pool, decking, hot tub, fountains, underwater lighting, filtration system, and every other improvement constructed on the Pickwick parcel were the legal property of Annis Pickwick under Kentucky fixtures law.
The HOA had fourteen days to remove decorative and personal effects.
After that, access terminated.
Charity’s attorney filed a motion for reconsideration on day six.
He argued unjust enrichment.
Judge Carrington denied it on day eight.
Her order stated that fixtures doctrine is strict because boundaries must mean something.
A landowner cannot be forced to compensate a trespasser for improving land without permission.
A person who builds across a boundary assumes the risk of discovering too late that concrete does not make a bad survey honest.
On day twelve, the HOA’s pool company arrived.
They removed pool covers, cleaning equipment, removable lights, stored chemicals, and supplies from the equipment shed.
The shed sat on HOA land, so they kept it.
The pool remained.
The decking remained.
The hot tub remained.
The fountains remained.
The blue tile remained.
On day fifteen, their access ended.
On day sixteen, at 6:00 a.m., Lincoln and I rode down in the four-wheeler with new high-tensile wire, locust corner posts, a post driver, fencing tools, and a thermos of Sadie’s coffee.
The morning was perfect.
The bluegrass was May green.
The mist was lifting off the south fork of the Kentucky River.
Cardinals called from the white oaks.
Red-winged blackbirds flashed along the fence row.
The herd was scattered west of us, grazing with the deep calm of cattle who have no idea they are about to inherit luxury.
Lincoln sat beside me wearing his work jeans, steel-toed Wellington boots, Pickwick Farm canvas jacket, and my grandfather’s old leather gloves.
He had not said much about the court order.
Lincoln is not theatrical.
He prefers useful words.
As we approached the pool, he looked over the travertine, the infinity edge, the hot tub, and the silent fountains.
Then he said, “Dad, this is going to be the most photographed cattle fence in Kentucky history.”
I said, “Probably.”
He nodded once.
Then we got to work.
By noon, the pool was inside our eastern pasture.
Not symbolically.
Not emotionally.
Physically.
Four strands of high-tensile fence with locust posts cut from my own woodlot wrapped around the pool, decking, hot tub, and flagstone path on the Pickwick side of the boundary.
It was a normal agricultural fence.
Tight.
Straight.
Legal.
The kind of fence central Kentucky has trusted longer than it has trusted committees.
We ate Sadie’s cornbread muffins on the travertine decking, sitting where HOA residents had expected to place lounge chairs and champagne glasses.
The decking was warm in the sun.
The mosaic tile glowed beneath clear water.
Lincoln looked down into the deep end.
“I’ll admit it,” he said.
“This is a nice pool.”
“It is.”
“You sure about the cattle?”
“Yes.”
“Not because it’ll be funny?”
“That part is extra.”
He looked at me.
I looked back at him.
“The agricultural use locks this down,” I said.
“If we keep it as a private pool, they spend years whining about unjust enrichment and recreational intent. If we convert it to livestock water, it becomes farm infrastructure. That is where we want it.”
Lincoln nodded.
“Farm use.”
“Farm use.”
He took another bite of cornbread.
“Auden is a very dangerous person.”
“She is her mother’s daughter.”
At 1:00 p.m., the pool belonged to the pasture.
At 2:00, Lincoln opened the gate.
At 2:14, the first three Angus heifers wandered toward the new fenced area.
They came slowly.
Cattle do not rush into new information.
They read the ground with their noses, ears, hooves, and memory.
The lead heifer was Number 17.
A four-year-old black Angus born on the farm in spring 2021.
Lincoln had marked her early as a lead animal because she had the rare kind of quiet intelligence that steadies a herd without force.
She was not the largest.
She was not the loudest.
She simply moved first and made good decisions.
The others trusted that.
She stepped onto the travertine decking carefully.
One hoof.
Then another.
She sniffed a limestone fountain.
She stared at the hot tub.
Then she walked to the infinity edge, lowered her head, and drank.
For ninety seconds, no one moved.
Lincoln watched.
I watched.
Two heifers behind her watched.
The blue water rippled around her mouth.
When Number 17 lifted her head, the two heifers behind her lowered theirs.
That was it.
The herd had accepted the idea.
By 2:30, five more cattle had entered.
By 3:00, eleven more.
By 4:00, around sixty head had either drunk from the pool, walked across the decking, sniffed the fountains, or stood staring into the hot tub as if contemplating the mistakes of civilization.
By sunset, every one of the two hundred and forty cattle in the eastern rotation had visited.
Some drank.
Some stood.
Some tested the stone with their hooves.
One steer attempted to lick the LED controller.
Lincoln disabled the controller immediately.
At 7:30, Sadie came down with coffee and three more pieces of cornbread.
We ate dinner sitting on the four-wheeler.
Number 17 had settled between the hot tub and the infinity edge.
She lay on the warm travertine, eyes half closed, looking more peaceful than any HOA resident ever had.
Sadie watched her.
“The herd has adopted the pool.”
“Yes.”
“Your father would have laughed.”
“Every day.”
Lincoln leaned on the steering wheel.
“She is lying beside a hot tub.”
“She is.”
“Charity’s going to need medical attention.”
“She might.”
We did not have to wait long.
Charity Whittington saw the cattle from her bedroom window at Lot 1 around 3:30 that afternoon.
Her house had the best view of the pool.
That had probably been intentional when the HOA chose the site.
By 3:45, she had called our landline twice.
Sadie answered the second call.
I was standing at the kitchen sink and heard every word from her side.
“Hello, Charity.”
A pause.
“No.”
Another pause.
“Because there is nothing to discuss.”
Longer pause.
“Charity, the pool is my husband’s property by court order.”
Pause.
“Yes, including the hot tub.”
Pause.
“No, the cattle are not in your residential community.”
Pause.
“The cattle are in our pasture.”
Pause.
“The pool is in our pasture.”
Pause.
“Your community is on the other side of the fence.”
Then Sadie hung up.
She wrote on the yellow legal pad we had started keeping on the island.
Communication ended.
3:51 p.m.
Sadie has always believed documentation is just manners with memory.
The reaction inside Bourbon Springs Estates was fascinating.
A third of the residents were outraged.
A third were amused.
A third were relieved.
That third turned out to matter most.
They were people who had endured Charity’s letters, fines, warnings, and improvement campaigns for years.
Wrong flowerpots.
Unauthorized door colors.
Children’s bikes visible from common space.
Exterior lighting warmth not matching approved color temperature.
One family received a notice because their elderly father sat on the porch in a white undershirt at breakfast, allegedly damaging “community visual cohesion.”
Charity had mistaken silence for agreement.
It was only exhaustion.
By day twenty, the Louisville Courier Journal ran a small story.
By day twenty-one, the Lexington Herald-Leader picked it up.
By day twenty-three, the Versailles Journal put it on the front page:
WOODFORD COUNTY RANCHER CONVERTS HOA POOL TO CATTLE WATERING TROUGH.
The photograph was simple.
Number 17 drinking from the infinity edge, Bourbon Springs clubhouse blurred in the distance.
It became the kind of image people shared not because it was dramatic, but because it explained itself before anyone read the headline.
Money had crossed a boundary.
Law had corrected it.
Cattle had finished the sentence.
A Courier Journal photographer called Auden’s office and asked whether she could photograph the herd.
I said yes.
She came on day twenty-six and spent four hours at the eastern fence.
She took nearly eight hundred photographs.
The best one ran in the Sunday edition.
Number 17 stood with her head lowered to the water, late afternoon light catching her black coat, the Mediterranean tile beneath her reflection.
Behind her, beyond the fence, Bourbon Springs Estates looked small.
That issue became the Courier Journal’s highest-selling Sunday paper of the spring.
By day thirty-three, a regional NPR affiliate ran a five-minute segment about Kentucky fixtures doctrine.
That amused Auden more than anything.
She said, “Daddy, nothing in law school prepared me for hearing fixture doctrine discussed between weather and bourbon tourism.”
The Kentucky Cattleman magazine called next.
They wanted a cover story.
I agreed because central Kentucky cattle producers deserve a laugh when the world provides one.
By day forty, Auden had received more than a hundred calls and emails from property owners dealing with HOA encroachments, developer overreach, misplaced fences, unauthorized landscaping, and “community improvements” built exactly where they did not belong.
Her firm took seven new agricultural property cases that summer.
She became known in Lexington legal circles as the Pool Lawyer.
She pretended to hate that.
She did not hate it.
The first Bourbon Springs resident to come down our gravel access road in peace was Dr. Wallace Holmstead.
Retired Louisville urologist.
Lot 7.
Old Ford pickup.
His wife, Greta, rode shotgun with a peach pie in a basket.
Wallace had the posture of a man used to examining uncomfortable truths and the voice of someone who had learned not to waste words.
He introduced himself at my porch.
“Mr. Pickwick, I believe my community owes you an apology. I cannot speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself.”
Greta handed Sadie the pie.
Sadie accepted it as though receiving diplomatic credentials.
Wallace asked if they could see the cattle drinking from the pool.
I drove them down in the four-wheeler.
We sat at the fence for twenty minutes.
Number 17 was at the infinity edge.
Two yearling steers stood on the travertine.
A small heifer attempted to chew the disabled lighting controller.
Wallace watched in silence.
Then he said, “Mr. Pickwick, this is the most satisfying sight I have witnessed since retirement.”
Greta touched his arm.
“You smiled more at that cow than you did at our anniversary cruise.”
“I liked the cruise,” he said.
“You complained about the buffet.”
“The cow has better judgment.”
We all laughed.
That was the beginning of something better.
Wallace invited Sadie and me to dinner at his home the following Saturday.
Six other Bourbon Springs couples attended.
Sadie brought cornbread.
Wallace smoked bourbon-glazed pork shoulder.
Greta served ricotta with Pickwick honey.
Nobody mentioned Charity for the first twenty minutes, which was polite.
Then everyone mentioned Charity.
Not angrily at first.
Carefully.
Like people approaching a horse that might kick.
One couple had been fined because their visiting grandchildren left sidewalk chalk on the driveway.
Another had received a violation because their dogwood tree bloomed “too visibly” against approved landscaping symmetry.
Another had been threatened for hosting too many cars at Thanksgiving.
By dessert, six couples had quietly indicated they would support an emergency HOA election.
Charity responded badly to the story spreading.
On day twenty-three, she filed a personal lawsuit against me.
Not the HOA.
Charity herself.
The complaint alleged “willful and wanton degradation of community property values.”
Damages sought:
One point two million dollars.
Auden filed a motion to dismiss the same afternoon.
She attached Judge Carrington’s quiet title order, Sven Borgman’s certified survey, and the fixtures statute.
The court dismissed Charity’s suit with prejudice on day thirty-one.
It assessed her personally for my attorney’s fees.
Eleven thousand dollars.
She paid by personal check on day thirty-six.
The check cleared.
Sadie made a copy for the file.
On day forty, Charity proposed a special HOA assessment of fifteen thousand dollars per household to build a replacement pool on the proper side of the property line.
Total assessment:
Three hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
The vote failed.
Twelve to fourteen.
Three abstentions.
One resident reportedly said, “I’m not paying fifteen thousand dollars because Charity wanted a pool with better views than her surveyor could support.”
That quote traveled faster than the newspaper story.
On day forty-five, eleven homeowners filed a petition for a recall meeting.
On day fifty-three, the vote happened.
Charity Whittington was removed as HOA president twenty-one to five.
Wallace Holmstead was elected interim president the same evening.
He called me the next morning.
“Annis,” he said, “the community would like to invite you and Sadie to dinner at the clubhouse next month.”
“That is generous.”
“We would like to rebuild relations with our western neighbors.”
“That sounds wise.”
“And with your permission, we would like to invite the herd.”
I laughed for the first time that morning.
“Wallace, the herd does not attend indoor functions.”
“We thought perhaps a ceremonial viewing from the fence line before dinner.”
“That can be arranged.”
The dinner was held on a warm Saturday in mid-June.
About fifty Bourbon Springs homeowners attended.
So did Sadie, Lincoln, Estelle, Auden, Connor, Little Granville, and my mother Genevieve.
That mattered to me more than I told anyone.
My mother had endured three years of Charity’s letters about farm odor, agricultural noise, and visual disturbance.
She had not set foot in Bourbon Springs during that time.
Now she arrived in her old Buick Park Avenue wearing a navy dress, pearls, and the calm expression of a woman whose family had owned land longer than anyone in that room had owned opinions about it.
Wallace opened the dinner.
He thanked the community for the orderly recall.
He thanked the Pickwick family for patience.
Then he invited me to speak.
I had prepared notes.
I did not use them.
I stood before a room full of people who had been enemies, strangers, bystanders, and now maybe neighbors.
“Good evening,” I said.
“My name is Annis Pickwick.”
“I run the cattle farm at the bottom of your hill.”
A few people smiled.
“I want to thank Wallace and the new board for inviting us here tonight.”
“I also want to thank this community for resolving a difficult matter in an orderly way.”
“The pool that has become a small national story is still what it was built to be.”
“A beautiful piece of luxury construction in a beautiful central Kentucky landscape.”
“The only thing that changed is which side of the fence it sits on and what kind of mammals drink from it.”
That got the first laugh.
I waited.
“My great-great-grandfather Granville Pickwick bought our first acres in 1851. He intended to leave them to his children. He intended those children to leave them to theirs. He intended the bluegrass to keep feeding cattle and the limestone springs to keep feeding wells long after he was gone.”
“He could not have imagined that in 2025 one of those water sources would be filtered through Italian mosaic tile.”
More laughter.
“But I think he would have appreciated the efficiency.”
This time, even my mother smiled.
“My family will continue to be your western neighbors.”
“We will continue to run cattle.”
“We will continue to bring up the next generation of Pickwicks on this land.”
“The pool will continue, for the life of its concrete shell, to be the most expensive cattle watering structure in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”
“You are welcome, with appropriate advance notice, to come see it.”
“Thank you for having us.”
The room applauded.
Not wildly.
Sincerely.
Wallace handed me a small glass of Woodford County bourbon.
He raised his glass.
“To fences in the right place.”
Everyone drank to that.
Charity and her husband, Pearson, sold their Lot 1 home in August for three point one million dollars.
The buyers were a Louisville couple who had specifically wanted to live in what they called “the famous cattle pool neighborhood.”
That amused Lincoln for weeks.
The Whittingtons moved to St. Petersburg, Florida.
They did not contact me.
I did not contact them.
Some endings do not require conversation.
Under Wallace’s presidency, Bourbon Springs reduced annual dues by twenty-three percent.
They created a fifteen-thousand-dollar annual contribution to the Woodford County Cattlemen’s Association.
They added a bylaw prohibiting HOA-funded construction within five hundred feet of the western property line without written consent from the Pickwick family.
Wallace said it was unnecessary because no sensible board would make the same mistake twice.
Greta told him sensible boards are not guaranteed by nature.
The bylaw passed unanimously.
The pool conversion took place in week three.
We had already disabled electrical components.
Hadley Foreman, a local agricultural contractor who had retrofitted farm water systems for twenty years, came out to inspect it.
When I explained what I needed, he looked at the infinity edge, the hot tub, the fountains, the mosaic tile, and the cattle tracks across the travertine.
Then he laughed for thirty seconds straight.
After that, he got serious.
The chemical filtration system was removed.
The water was drained, flushed, tested, and refilled.
A livestock-grade water supply system was installed drawing from our existing 1958 well.
The fountains were capped and converted to recirculation-free overflow points.
The hot tub was disconnected from heat and turned into an auxiliary trough.
The infinity edge became a drinking ledge.
The underwater lights were removed or sealed.
Hadley completed the work in four days.
Total cost:
Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars.
I paid eleven thousand of it with Charity’s attorney-fee check.
The remaining thirty-two hundred came from working capital.
Sadie said it was the first time Charity had made a useful contribution to herd health.
The water tested perfectly.
Clean.
Cool.
Mineral profile acceptable.
No chemical residue.
No contamination.
The cattle preferred it immediately.
Lincoln started tracking usage because that is what Lincoln does.
By July, we noticed something unexpected.
The cattle using the pool water gained slightly faster than those spending more time in the south pasture tanks.
Not a dramatic difference.
Enough to notice.
Lincoln attributed it to water temperature and accessibility.
The pool water stayed around three degrees cooler during afternoon heat.
The travertine decking warmed in the morning and held comfortable heat into evening.
The herd began using the area not only for drinking but for cooling and resting.
By late July, during hot stretches between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m., the eastern herd spent around three hours a day near the pool.
They drank.
They stood at the edge.
They rested on the warm stone.
Number 17 claimed the area between the hot tub and infinity edge as her preferred spot.
No other animal challenged her.
Leadership has privileges, even among cattle.
The pool aged differently under hooves than it would have under bare feet.
The travertine developed a gentle polish.
The mosaic tile held up better than expected.
The infinity edge took on small marks from daily use, not damage exactly, but evidence.
That mattered to me.
Objects should show the truth of their service.
A year later, I sat on the back porch of the 1859 farmhouse with my mother Genevieve and watched my grandson Granville chase a green tree frog in circles around the side yard.
He had named the frog Daisy.
Nobody knew why.
He wore navy overalls Auden bought him for his third birthday.
The herd was at two hundred and forty-six head that spring.
The pool was fully integrated into daily rotation.
It had become ordinary.
That was the strangest part.
For a few months, it was a story.
Then it became infrastructure.
Cattle do not care about irony.
They care about water.
And shade.
And footing.
And whether the lead heifer says the place is safe.
By all their measures, the pool had passed.
That same year, we founded two things.
The Granville Pickwick Bluegrass Apprenticeship at the University of Kentucky.
Four thousand dollars a year to a Woodford County High School graduate entering animal husbandry, agricultural sciences, or veterinary medicine.
The first recipient was Rilla Lahan from Versailles, a seventeen-year-old whose father trained thoroughbreds and whose mother ran an organic produce stand.
She wrote me a thank-you letter in careful blue ink.
She said she wanted to become a large-animal vet because cows and horses deserved doctors who were not afraid of mud.
I liked her immediately.
The second was the Genevieve Pickwick Multigenerational Farming Fund, administered through Auden’s law firm.
It provides pro bono legal support to small central Kentucky family farms facing property encroachment, unauthorized infrastructure, expired easement disputes, or pressure from developers and HOAs.
We seeded it with seventy-five thousand dollars from settlement money related to the dispute.
My mother objected to having her name on it.
Then she read the first intake letter from an elderly widow in Madison County whose neighbor had moved a fence six feet west over twenty years.
After that, she said the fund could keep her name.
Auden was promoted to junior partner in March.
Her agricultural property practice doubled.
She still answers my calls on the second ring.
Lincoln and Estelle had their first child in October.
A girl.
They named her Tabitha after the woman who wanted bluegrass land before any Pickwick man understood how badly the family would need it.
Tabitha was born at 8:14 p.m. on a warm Tuesday.
Seven pounds, four ounces.
My mother inspected her in the hospital recovery room and announced she had the Pickwick first-daughter dimple.
Sadie cried.
I held Tabitha for an hour and a half.
Lincoln sat in the visitor’s chair and watched quietly.
Estelle slept.
When Tabitha was one month old, Lincoln drove her down to the eastern pasture in a carrier secured to the four-wheeler.
He told me later that Number 17 looked up from the pool, stared at the baby for several seconds, then went back to drinking.
He described it as recognition.
I described it as cattle curiosity.
Sadie said both could be true.
Wallace Holmstead became a friend.
That surprised me, though it should not have.
Friendship in later life often starts less with shared hobbies and more with shared relief.
He had spent years watching Charity turn a neighborhood into an argument.
I had spent years receiving her letters.
After the recall, we found we liked the same things.
Coffee.
Plain speech.
Quiet mornings.
Grandchildren.
Land that has a use.
He comes down the gravel road every few weeks with a jar of Greta’s homemade quince jelly.
Sadie says it is the best she has ever tasted.
Wallace and I have spent forty hours on porches, in pastures, at cafés, and along the fence line.
Three times, he has brought his twin grandsons to watch the cattle drink from the pool.
Every time, one of them asks, “Grandpa, are those cows drinking out of a swimming pool?”
And every time, Wallace says, “Yes, boys. They are very lucky cows.”
I sleep well now.
I did not sleep well during the forty-three days between Sven Borgman’s survey and Judge Carrington’s order.
There were two worries.
The first was legal.
Courts sometimes surprise you.
Even when the law is clear, a judge can find a narrow procedural reason to slow the truth down.
The second worry was personal.
I wondered if converting the pool would become a small, petty satisfaction I would regret ten years later.
That matters.
An old man can win and still become smaller in the winning.
On day thirty-eight, Sadie sat with me at the kitchen island over a glass of bourbon.
She listened to me say what I had not said out loud.
Then she said, “Annis, the pool is going to water cattle for the rest of your life.”
I looked at her.
“The herd is going to enjoy it. Granville is going to grow up riding down there with you to watch them drink. Auden is going to help other farmers because of this. Lincoln is going to improve herd management because of it. Your mother is going to laugh every time she sees a photograph of Number 17 on that blue tile.”
She took my hand.
“You are not going to regret it.”
She was right.
I slept better that night.
I slept better after the order.
I sleep well now.
Here is what I learned.
The law does not have to be loud to be strong.
A boundary does not have to shout to hold.
A quiet title action can do more than anger.
A fence can say everything that needs saying.
Kentucky fixtures doctrine had been sitting in plain sight for generations, waiting for the day a luxury HOA built permanent concrete six feet inside a cattle pasture and discovered that confidence is not a substitute for a survey.
Charity Whittington did not fall because I shouted.
I did not shout.
She fell because Granville Pickwick bought land in 1851 and his descendants kept the records.
She fell because my daughter read the law correctly.
She fell because Sven Borgman placed a GPS point where a lie had been poured into concrete.
She fell because Judge Carrington understood that property lines matter.
She fell because Wallace Holmstead had enough decency left to help his community turn around.
She fell because Number 17 lowered her head over an infinity edge at 2:14 on a Tuesday afternoon in May and drank like the water had always been meant for her.
The real victory was not humiliating Charity.
Humiliation fades.
The real victory was turning trespass into use.
It was watching my grandson chase a frog named Daisy while cattle drank from Italian tile in the distance.
It was seeing Bourbon Springs residents become neighbors instead of spectators.
It was hearing my mother say, after her first visit to the converted pool, “Your father would have told that story every Sunday until he died.”
It was giving Auden’s law practice a case she could use to protect other farms.
It was proving, quietly and permanently, that land still remembers who belongs to it.
The pool is still there.
The cattle still drink from it.
The travertine is hoof-polished now.
The hot tub is an auxiliary trough.
The infinity edge works better for Angus than it ever would have for people holding cocktails.
Number 17 still claims the warm spot between the hot tub and the ledge.
The clubhouse still sits on the hill beyond the fence.
Sometimes residents walk down with permission and watch from the proper side.
They take photographs.
They laugh.
They ask questions about cattle.
They learn something about land, law, and the danger of building before checking where the boundary actually lies.
And every so often, when the evening light turns the water blue and the herd gathers in a slow black line along the edge, I think about my great-great-grandmother Tabitha.
The woman who wanted a piece of bluegrass of her own.
I think she would understand.
Some land is worth waiting for.
Some lines are worth defending.
And sometimes the most expensive swimming pool in the county becomes exactly what it should have been all along.
A place where the animals drink, the grass keeps growing, and the people on the hill finally learn to stay on their own side of the fence.
REVIEW
HOA BUILT A $100K POOL ON MY LAND — ONE QUIET MOVE TURNED IT INTO MY CATTLE’S WATER SOURCE
The first time I saw the pool, I thought I had taken a wrong turn on my own land.
That is not a figure of speech.
I was riding the four-wheeler down the eastern fence line of my pasture on a Tuesday morning in early April, checking on a heifer that had calved sometime in the night.
The grass was wet.
The bluegrass had that early spring shine to it, bright enough to make an old cattleman believe winter had finally lost its grip.
A thin white mist sat low along the ground, drifting over the slope like smoke from a fire nobody had started.
I had one hand on the throttle and one eye on the herd when something blue flashed beyond the fence line.
Not pond blue.
Not creek blue.
Pool blue.
Clean, expensive, impossible blue.
I slowed the four-wheeler.
Then I stopped completely.
There, sitting where my pasture rolled toward the eastern boundary, was a luxury swimming pool.
Fifty feet by twenty-five.
Travertine decking.
Italian mosaic tile on the bottom in a bright Mediterranean pattern.
A hot tub at the north end.
Three decorative limestone fountains in the deep end.
Underwater LED lights.
A small infinity edge overlooking my bluegrass slope to the west.
It was, by every measure of pool engineering, a beautiful thing.
It was also six feet inside the recorded boundary of my pasture.
I sat there on the four-wheeler, engine idling beneath me, watching the morning sunlight catch the tile.
For a long moment, I did not say anything.
Cattle moved behind me with the slow, patient sound of hooves in wet grass.
A cardinal called from the white oak grove.
The pool’s fountains were off, but the water still looked arrogant.
That was the word that came to me.
Arrogant.
As if the thing knew it had no business being there and had decided to sparkle anyway.
Later, from the Bourbon Springs Estates HOA construction file, I would learn the pool had cost one hundred seventeen thousand four hundred dollars.
At that moment, I only knew three things.
Somebody had built it on my land.
Somebody had spent a lot of money doing it.
And somebody had assumed I would not notice.
My name is Annis Pickwick.
I am sixty years old.
I run four hundred and eighty acres of bluegrass cattle pasture and eighty acres of small thoroughbred operation in Woodford County, Kentucky.
The Pickwick family has been on this land since 1851, when my great-great-grandfather Granville Pickwick bought the original two hundred and fifty acres from a Lexington land office using the proceeds from a small Louisville tobacco brokerage.
Family history says he would not have bought the land without my great-great-grandmother Tabitha pushing him for ten straight years.
She had grown up on a small Bourbon County horse farm, and she wanted a piece of bluegrass of her own.
Not a house in town.
Not a rented pasture.
Land.
Something underfoot that no man could take back when moods changed or markets turned.
Granville listened eventually.
That was the first wise thing he did for this family.
The second was keeping it.
The Pickwicks have run cattle here for five generations.
We have buried men in suits and men in work shirts.
We have watched foals stand for the first time in the mist.
We have pulled calves during storms.
We have mended fence in heat, frost, and rain.
We have watched bluegrass turn from spring green to summer heavy to winter gray and back again so many times that the land has become less like property and more like a relative.
My father, also named Granville Pickwick, inherited the farm in 1971.
He ran it for thirty-seven years.
He died in 2008 from a sudden heart attack while moving the herd from the south pasture to the eastern grazing rotation.
That was the kind of death men like my father almost plan without meaning to.
No hospital bed.
No long speech.
Just boots in grass and work unfinished.
I inherited the operation the same year at forty-three.
By training, I am a veterinarian.
I went to Auburn for my doctorate of veterinary medicine in 1989 and spent twelve years running a large-animal practice out of Versailles, Kentucky.
Horses, cattle, emergencies at two in the morning, hands numb in February, shirts ruined in July.
That was my life.
Then my father’s stroke in 2003 pulled me back into farm management full-time.
I kept practicing for five more years.
After he died, the farm became the practice.
My wife, Sadie, is fifty-eight.
She runs a small farm-to-table restaurant in Midway called Pickwick’s Table.
Forty customers a service.
Three evenings a week.
No gimmicks.
No foam on plates.
No menu language requiring a dictionary.
She serves what Kentucky land gives honestly.
Cornbread.
Beef.
Beans.
Greens.
Peaches when the peaches are right.
She has never lost a reservation to a competitor in eleven seasons, and if you ask any food critic who has passed through central Kentucky in the last decade, they will tell you her cornbread is the best south of the Ohio River.
She met me at Auburn in 1986.
She was a hospitality management junior.
I was a first-year veterinary student.
She said I looked tired, hungry, and too serious for my own good.
She married me anyway.
We have two children.
Lincoln is thirty-two and runs the day-to-day cattle operation.
He is quiet like my father.
He can look across eighty acres and know which animal is off by half a step.
His wife, Estelle, teaches fourth grade in Frankfort.
Our daughter, Auden, is twenty-nine.
She is an agricultural attorney in Lexington.
She specializes in Kentucky farm family estate planning and agricultural property disputes.
She graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law in 2020.
She married Connor Burchard, a Bourbon County horseman, in 2022.
They have a son named Granville, after my father.
He is two and a half and already believes every frog on the farm is personally acquainted with him.
My mother, Genevieve Pickwick, is eighty-one.
She still lives in the original 1859 brick farmhouse my great-great-grandfather built.
She has lived there continuously since she married my father in 1962.
She still makes breakfast at 5:45 every morning.
She still walks the long loop around the north pasture at 6:30 in every kind of weather Kentucky offers.
She still serves on the Woodford County Bourbon Trail Heritage Commission.
She has been doing that since 1981, which means she has outlasted six county judges, three chairmen, two scandals, one failed branding campaign, and every woman who ever underestimated her because she wore gardening shoes to meetings.
That is my household.
That is my land.
And to the immediate east of that land sits Bourbon Springs Estates.
Twenty-six luxury homes built between 2018 and 2020 by a Louisville developer on land that used to be Donnelly Stud, a small thoroughbred breeding operation.
Average sale price, three point four million dollars.
HOA dues, twenty-eight thousand a year.
Stone gates.
Private roads.
Central plaza.
A clubhouse with copper gutters.
A wine room nobody needed.
And residents who had paid enough money to believe views were something the world owed them.
The president of the Bourbon Springs Estates Homeowners Association was Charity Whittington.
Charity had been writing me certified letters for three years.
The first one was almost polite.
It referenced “ambient agricultural concerns.”
That meant cattle smell.
The second referenced “early morning equipment noise.”
That meant hay cutting.
The third referenced “visual disruption along the eastern community edge.”
That meant my fence line.
By the fourth letter, she had started using phrases like “documented appraisal impact.”
By the eleventh letter, she threatened “escalating community legal action” unless I installed what she called a “visual screening barrier” along the entire eastern boundary at my own expense.
I replied to every letter.
Politely.
I attached Kentucky’s right-to-farm statute every time.
I explained, in the same two paragraphs, that two hundred and forty Angus cattle on agriculturally zoned land that had been in continuous agricultural use since before the Civil War was not a nuisance under Kentucky law.
It was the law’s favorite example of what agriculture is.
Charity did not appreciate this.
People like Charity believe a polite refusal is just an argument waiting to be improved with pressure.
She did not understand that I was raised by people who could say no and then go feed cattle without feeling the need to explain themselves again.
My father had received similar letters near the end of his life from the developer during the marketing phase of Bourbon Springs Estates.
My mother typed his replies while he dictated from the kitchen island.
In one of them, he wrote that the Pickwick farm and Bourbon Springs Estates would be sharing that corner of Woodford County for the next hundred years, and he would prefer that the sharing be civil.
He died before learning whether that would happen.
Standing there in April, looking at a luxury pool sitting inside my pasture, I had my answer.
No.
It would not be civil.
Not yet.
I called Auden at her office in Lexington at 11:00 a.m.
She answered on the second ring.
“Daddy?”
“There is a swimming pool in my pasture.”
There was a pause.
Not long.
Just long enough for my daughter, the lawyer, to decide whether she had heard me correctly.
“What kind of swimming pool?”
“The expensive kind.”
“Where?”
“Eastern boundary.”
“How far over?”
“Looks like six feet inside our line, maybe more.”
Another pause.
This one was colder.
“Do not touch anything.”
“I wasn’t planning to swim.”
“Daddy.”
“I won’t touch anything.”
“Send me the GPS coordinates.”
I sent them from my phone.
She called back at 1:14 p.m.
“Daddy, Sven Borgman is on his way.”
Sven Borgman was the best boundary surveyor in central Kentucky.
He had been doing horse farm boundary work since 1988.
If a survey pin had been buried by three floods, two divorces, a barn fire, and one dishonest cousin, Sven could find it.
He arrived at 2:00 p.m. in a green Subaru with a survey rod, GPS receiver, and a small leather satchel.
He shook my hand.
He listened to me for two minutes.
Then he went to work.
He walked the eastern fence line for an hour.
He set GPS points at all four corners of the pool.
He set points at the recorded eastern boundary stone my father had set in 1971.
He set points at the southeast corner survey pin my grandfather had set in 1934.
He compared readings against the certified Woodford County plat from 1996.
At 3:30 p.m., he met me at the pasture gate.
“Mr. Pickwick,” he said, “the pool’s western edge sits six feet two inches inside your recorded boundary.”
I said nothing.
“The southern edge sits four feet eight inches inside.”
He looked back at the pool.
“The total area of the pool and travertine decking physically on your property is approximately four hundred and twelve square feet.”
I looked at him.
“That substantial?”
“That is not a marginal encroachment.”
He glanced once more at the Mediterranean tile.
“That is a substantial trespass by a permanent structure.”
“How long has it been there?”
Sven knelt and touched the edge of the grout near the decking.
“Based on curing, weathering, and the condition of the travertine, I would estimate between nine and fourteen months.”
“Summer of last year?”
“That would be my guess.”
I had not ridden that section of fence in the summer of 2024.
Lincoln had managed the eastern rotation that year.
The pool had been built during one of those windows where nothing about the herd required us to visit that precise corner.
The HOA had not made a mistake in daylight.
They had made one in confidence.
I called Auden back at 4:00.
I gave her Sven’s findings.
She did not sound surprised.
She sounded ready.
“Daddy, this is a clean Kentucky fixtures case.”
“Explain it to me like I’m a cattleman.”
“You are a cattleman.”
“Exactly.”
She took a breath.
“In Kentucky, when someone builds a permanent structure on private land without the landowner’s written consent, that structure generally becomes part of the real estate.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it belongs to the landowner.”
“The pool.”
“The pool.”
“The decking.”
“Yes.”
“The hot tub.”
“Yes.”
“The fountains.”
“Yes.”
“The lights.”
“Yes.”
“The filtration system.”
“Yes.”
I looked out over the pasture.
The water was still blue.
The cattle were still calm.
The world had shifted anyway.
“What is the right path?”
Auden went quiet.
That is something she gets from her mother.
She does not rush when something matters.
“Daddy, I want to think overnight.”
“The obvious move is quiet title?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“The obvious remedy would be demanding removal at their expense.”
“That sounds obvious.”
“It is also messy. It gives them eighteen months to hate you in court.”
“They already hate me.”
“Not at the level they will.”
I smiled despite myself.
“What is the better idea?”
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
She called at 7:00 a.m.
I was at the kitchen island with coffee.
Sadie was rolling biscuit dough near the sink.
Auden did not waste time.
“Daddy, I have the quiet move.”
Sadie looked up immediately.
She knows our daughter.
When Auden uses that tone, she has found the softest way to make something irreversible.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“We file quiet title and win fast under Kentucky fixtures doctrine.”
“All right.”
“Once title is confirmed, you do not demand removal.”
I frowned.
“No?”
“No.”
“What do I do?”
“You extend your cattle fence around it.”
Sadie stopped rolling dough.
Auden continued.
“You make the pool part of the eastern pasture.”
I said nothing.
“The HOA cannot stop you. It will be your structure on your land.”
Sadie’s eyes narrowed.
She was starting to understand.
“Then,” Auden said, “you drain the chemical system, disconnect anything not livestock-safe, replace the filtration with a cattle-grade water system drawing from your existing well, and convert the pool into a permanent water source for the herd.”
I sat there with my coffee halfway to my mouth.
“The HOA’s hundred-thousand-dollar luxury pool becomes my cattle’s water trough.”
“Legally, yes.”
Sadie turned toward the window.
For five seconds, her face remained perfectly still.
Then she laughed so hard she had to set the rolling pin down.
I did not laugh at first.
I was thinking.
That is the difference between revenge and structure.
Revenge acts fast because it wants the feeling.
Structure waits because it wants the result.
Auden was right.
If I demanded demolition, the HOA could turn it into a community martyr story.
Cruel farmer destroys neighborhood amenity.
Property values.
Children.
Recreation.
All the usual theater.
But if the pool became a lawful agricultural water source, it stopped being a disputed amenity and became farm infrastructure.
Kentucky law knows farm infrastructure.
Kentucky courts understand water for cattle better than they understand HOA feelings.
I took a slow drink of coffee.
“File it.”
Auden filed the quiet title action that Friday.
The complaint was calm.
That mattered.
It did not accuse Charity of evil.
It did not call the HOA arrogant.
It did not mention cattle drinking from infinity edges.
It simply identified the parcel, attached Sven’s survey, cited Kentucky fixtures doctrine, and requested declaration of ownership over the improvements built on the Pickwick parcel without consent.
Charity’s attorney answered with outrage disguised as legal argument.
The HOA had built the pool in good faith.
The HOA had relied on contractor surveys.
The HOA had invested community funds.
The HOA had intended the structure for member use.
None of that changed where the concrete sat.
That is the pleasant thing about land records.
They do not care about intentions after the boundary is crossed.
For six weeks, I continued doing what spring requires.
Calving.
Pasture rotation.
Fence repair.
Hoof checks for the thoroughbreds.
Vet calls I still took for old neighbors who trusted my hands more than they trusted younger men with newer trucks.
I rode the eastern fence line fourteen times during those weeks.
The pool sat behind a temporary orange construction barrier on the HOA side.
The barrier looked embarrassed.
It was too flimsy to stop a child, much less Kentucky property law.
Charity filed three procedural motions.
One argued the pool should be exempt from fixtures doctrine because it served a “public purpose.”
Auden’s response was eleven pages and sharp enough to shave with.
There is no public-purpose exception allowing a private HOA to build a luxury pool on agricultural land and keep ownership because it wishes it had not trespassed.
The court denied that motion in three sentences.
Another motion requested additional time to retain specialized land-use counsel.
Judge Tessa Carrington denied that too.
At the hearing, she looked over her glasses at Charity’s attorney and said, “Counsel, additional lawyers will not move the property line.”
I liked Judge Carrington immediately.
The quiet title order came on the third Tuesday of May.
It was unambiguous.
The pool, decking, hot tub, fountains, underwater lighting, filtration system, and every other improvement constructed on the Pickwick parcel were the legal property of Annis Pickwick under Kentucky fixtures law.
The HOA had fourteen days to remove decorative and personal effects.
After that, access terminated.
Charity’s attorney filed a motion for reconsideration on day six.
He argued unjust enrichment.
Judge Carrington denied it on day eight.
Her order stated that fixtures doctrine is strict because boundaries must mean something.
A landowner cannot be forced to compensate a trespasser for improving land without permission.
A person who builds across a boundary assumes the risk of discovering too late that concrete does not make a bad survey honest.
On day twelve, the HOA’s pool company arrived.
They removed pool covers, cleaning equipment, removable lights, stored chemicals, and supplies from the equipment shed.
The shed sat on HOA land, so they kept it.
The pool remained.
The decking remained.
The hot tub remained.
The fountains remained.
The blue tile remained.
On day fifteen, their access ended.
On day sixteen, at 6:00 a.m., Lincoln and I rode down in the four-wheeler with new high-tensile wire, locust corner posts, a post driver, fencing tools, and a thermos of Sadie’s coffee.
The morning was perfect.
The bluegrass was May green.
The mist was lifting off the south fork of the Kentucky River.
Cardinals called from the white oaks.
Red-winged blackbirds flashed along the fence row.
The herd was scattered west of us, grazing with the deep calm of cattle who have no idea they are about to inherit luxury.
Lincoln sat beside me wearing his work jeans, steel-toed Wellington boots, Pickwick Farm canvas jacket, and my grandfather’s old leather gloves.
He had not said much about the court order.
Lincoln is not theatrical.
He prefers useful words.
As we approached the pool, he looked over the travertine, the infinity edge, the hot tub, and the silent fountains.
Then he said, “Dad, this is going to be the most photographed cattle fence in Kentucky history.”
I said, “Probably.”
He nodded once.
Then we got to work.
By noon, the pool was inside our eastern pasture.
Not symbolically.
Not emotionally.
Physically.
Four strands of high-tensile fence with locust posts cut from my own woodlot wrapped around the pool, decking, hot tub, and flagstone path on the Pickwick side of the boundary.
It was a normal agricultural fence.
Tight.
Straight.
Legal.
The kind of fence central Kentucky has trusted longer than it has trusted committees.
We ate Sadie’s cornbread muffins on the travertine decking, sitting where HOA residents had expected to place lounge chairs and champagne glasses.
The decking was warm in the sun.
The mosaic tile glowed beneath clear water.
Lincoln looked down into the deep end.
“I’ll admit it,” he said.
“This is a nice pool.”
“It is.”
“You sure about the cattle?”
“Yes.”
“Not because it’ll be funny?”
“That part is extra.”
He looked at me.
I looked back at him.
“The agricultural use locks this down,” I said.
“If we keep it as a private pool, they spend years whining about unjust enrichment and recreational intent. If we convert it to livestock water, it becomes farm infrastructure. That is where we want it.”
Lincoln nodded.
“Farm use.”
“Farm use.”
He took another bite of cornbread.
“Auden is a very dangerous person.”
“She is her mother’s daughter.”
At 1:00 p.m., the pool belonged to the pasture.
At 2:00, Lincoln opened the gate.
At 2:14, the first three Angus heifers wandered toward the new fenced area.
They came slowly.
Cattle do not rush into new information.
They read the ground with their noses, ears, hooves, and memory.
The lead heifer was Number 17.
A four-year-old black Angus born on the farm in spring 2021.
Lincoln had marked her early as a lead animal because she had the rare kind of quiet intelligence that steadies a herd without force.
She was not the largest.
She was not the loudest.
She simply moved first and made good decisions.
The others trusted that.
She stepped onto the travertine decking carefully.
One hoof.
Then another.
She sniffed a limestone fountain.
She stared at the hot tub.
Then she walked to the infinity edge, lowered her head, and drank.
For ninety seconds, no one moved.
Lincoln watched.
I watched.
Two heifers behind her watched.
The blue water rippled around her mouth.
When Number 17 lifted her head, the two heifers behind her lowered theirs.
That was it.
The herd had accepted the idea.
By 2:30, five more cattle had entered.
By 3:00, eleven more.
By 4:00, around sixty head had either drunk from the pool, walked across the decking, sniffed the fountains, or stood staring into the hot tub as if contemplating the mistakes of civilization.
By sunset, every one of the two hundred and forty cattle in the eastern rotation had visited.
Some drank.
Some stood.
Some tested the stone with their hooves.
One steer attempted to lick the LED controller.
Lincoln disabled the controller immediately.
At 7:30, Sadie came down with coffee and three more pieces of cornbread.
We ate dinner sitting on the four-wheeler.
Number 17 had settled between the hot tub and the infinity edge.
She lay on the warm travertine, eyes half closed, looking more peaceful than any HOA resident ever had.
Sadie watched her.
“The herd has adopted the pool.”
“Yes.”
“Your father would have laughed.”
“Every day.”
Lincoln leaned on the steering wheel.
“She is lying beside a hot tub.”
“She is.”
“Charity’s going to need medical attention.”
“She might.”
We did not have to wait long.
Charity Whittington saw the cattle from her bedroom window at Lot 1 around 3:30 that afternoon.
Her house had the best view of the pool.
That had probably been intentional when the HOA chose the site.
By 3:45, she had called our landline twice.
Sadie answered the second call.
I was standing at the kitchen sink and heard every word from her side.
“Hello, Charity.”
A pause.
“No.”
Another pause.
“Because there is nothing to discuss.”
Longer pause.
“Charity, the pool is my husband’s property by court order.”
Pause.
“Yes, including the hot tub.”
Pause.
“No, the cattle are not in your residential community.”
Pause.
“The cattle are in our pasture.”
Pause.
“The pool is in our pasture.”
Pause.
“Your community is on the other side of the fence.”
Then Sadie hung up.
She wrote on the yellow legal pad we had started keeping on the island.
Communication ended.
3:51 p.m.
Sadie has always believed documentation is just manners with memory.
The reaction inside Bourbon Springs Estates was fascinating.
A third of the residents were outraged.
A third were amused.
A third were relieved.
That third turned out to matter most.
They were people who had endured Charity’s letters, fines, warnings, and improvement campaigns for years.
Wrong flowerpots.
Unauthorized door colors.
Children’s bikes visible from common space.
Exterior lighting warmth not matching approved color temperature.
One family received a notice because their elderly father sat on the porch in a white undershirt at breakfast, allegedly damaging “community visual cohesion.”
Charity had mistaken silence for agreement.
It was only exhaustion.
By day twenty, the Louisville Courier Journal ran a small story.
By day twenty-one, the Lexington Herald-Leader picked it up.
By day twenty-three, the Versailles Journal put it on the front page:
WOODFORD COUNTY RANCHER CONVERTS HOA POOL TO CATTLE WATERING TROUGH.
The photograph was simple.
Number 17 drinking from the infinity edge, Bourbon Springs clubhouse blurred in the distance.
It became the kind of image people shared not because it was dramatic, but because it explained itself before anyone read the headline.
Money had crossed a boundary.
Law had corrected it.
Cattle had finished the sentence.
A Courier Journal photographer called Auden’s office and asked whether she could photograph the herd.
I said yes.
She came on day twenty-six and spent four hours at the eastern fence.
She took nearly eight hundred photographs.
The best one ran in the Sunday edition.
Number 17 stood with her head lowered to the water, late afternoon light catching her black coat, the Mediterranean tile beneath her reflection.
Behind her, beyond the fence, Bourbon Springs Estates looked small.
That issue became the Courier Journal’s highest-selling Sunday paper of the spring.
By day thirty-three, a regional NPR affiliate ran a five-minute segment about Kentucky fixtures doctrine.
That amused Auden more than anything.
She said, “Daddy, nothing in law school prepared me for hearing fixture doctrine discussed between weather and bourbon tourism.”
The Kentucky Cattleman magazine called next.
They wanted a cover story.
I agreed because central Kentucky cattle producers deserve a laugh when the world provides one.
By day forty, Auden had received more than a hundred calls and emails from property owners dealing with HOA encroachments, developer overreach, misplaced fences, unauthorized landscaping, and “community improvements” built exactly where they did not belong.
Her firm took seven new agricultural property cases that summer.
She became known in Lexington legal circles as the Pool Lawyer.
She pretended to hate that.
She did not hate it.
The first Bourbon Springs resident to come down our gravel access road in peace was Dr. Wallace Holmstead.
Retired Louisville urologist.
Lot 7.
Old Ford pickup.
His wife, Greta, rode shotgun with a peach pie in a basket.
Wallace had the posture of a man used to examining uncomfortable truths and the voice of someone who had learned not to waste words.
He introduced himself at my porch.
“Mr. Pickwick, I believe my community owes you an apology. I cannot speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself.”
Greta handed Sadie the pie.
Sadie accepted it as though receiving diplomatic credentials.
Wallace asked if they could see the cattle drinking from the pool.
I drove them down in the four-wheeler.
We sat at the fence for twenty minutes.
Number 17 was at the infinity edge.
Two yearling steers stood on the travertine.
A small heifer attempted to chew the disabled lighting controller.
Wallace watched in silence.
Then he said, “Mr. Pickwick, this is the most satisfying sight I have witnessed since retirement.”
Greta touched his arm.
“You smiled more at that cow than you did at our anniversary cruise.”
“I liked the cruise,” he said.
“You complained about the buffet.”
“The cow has better judgment.”
We all laughed.
That was the beginning of something better.
Wallace invited Sadie and me to dinner at his home the following Saturday.
Six other Bourbon Springs couples attended.
Sadie brought cornbread.
Wallace smoked bourbon-glazed pork shoulder.
Greta served ricotta with Pickwick honey.
Nobody mentioned Charity for the first twenty minutes, which was polite.
Then everyone mentioned Charity.
Not angrily at first.
Carefully.
Like people approaching a horse that might kick.
One couple had been fined because their visiting grandchildren left sidewalk chalk on the driveway.
Another had received a violation because their dogwood tree bloomed “too visibly” against approved landscaping symmetry.
Another had been threatened for hosting too many cars at Thanksgiving.
By dessert, six couples had quietly indicated they would support an emergency HOA election.
Charity responded badly to the story spreading.
On day twenty-three, she filed a personal lawsuit against me.
Not the HOA.
Charity herself.
The complaint alleged “willful and wanton degradation of community property values.”
Damages sought:
One point two million dollars.
Auden filed a motion to dismiss the same afternoon.
She attached Judge Carrington’s quiet title order, Sven Borgman’s certified survey, and the fixtures statute.
The court dismissed Charity’s suit with prejudice on day thirty-one.
It assessed her personally for my attorney’s fees.
Eleven thousand dollars.
She paid by personal check on day thirty-six.
The check cleared.
Sadie made a copy for the file.
On day forty, Charity proposed a special HOA assessment of fifteen thousand dollars per household to build a replacement pool on the proper side of the property line.
Total assessment:
Three hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
The vote failed.
Twelve to fourteen.
Three abstentions.
One resident reportedly said, “I’m not paying fifteen thousand dollars because Charity wanted a pool with better views than her surveyor could support.”
That quote traveled faster than the newspaper story.
On day forty-five, eleven homeowners filed a petition for a recall meeting.
On day fifty-three, the vote happened.
Charity Whittington was removed as HOA president twenty-one to five.
Wallace Holmstead was elected interim president the same evening.
He called me the next morning.
“Annis,” he said, “the community would like to invite you and Sadie to dinner at the clubhouse next month.”
“That is generous.”
“We would like to rebuild relations with our western neighbors.”
“That sounds wise.”
“And with your permission, we would like to invite the herd.”
I laughed for the first time that morning.
“Wallace, the herd does not attend indoor functions.”
“We thought perhaps a ceremonial viewing from the fence line before dinner.”
“That can be arranged.”
The dinner was held on a warm Saturday in mid-June.
About fifty Bourbon Springs homeowners attended.
So did Sadie, Lincoln, Estelle, Auden, Connor, Little Granville, and my mother Genevieve.
That mattered to me more than I told anyone.
My mother had endured three years of Charity’s letters about farm odor, agricultural noise, and visual disturbance.
She had not set foot in Bourbon Springs during that time.
Now she arrived in her old Buick Park Avenue wearing a navy dress, pearls, and the calm expression of a woman whose family had owned land longer than anyone in that room had owned opinions about it.
Wallace opened the dinner.
He thanked the community for the orderly recall.
He thanked the Pickwick family for patience.
Then he invited me to speak.
I had prepared notes.
I did not use them.
I stood before a room full of people who had been enemies, strangers, bystanders, and now maybe neighbors.
“Good evening,” I said.
“My name is Annis Pickwick.”
“I run the cattle farm at the bottom of your hill.”
A few people smiled.
“I want to thank Wallace and the new board for inviting us here tonight.”
“I also want to thank this community for resolving a difficult matter in an orderly way.”
“The pool that has become a small national story is still what it was built to be.”
“A beautiful piece of luxury construction in a beautiful central Kentucky landscape.”
“The only thing that changed is which side of the fence it sits on and what kind of mammals drink from it.”
That got the first laugh.
I waited.
“My great-great-grandfather Granville Pickwick bought our first acres in 1851. He intended to leave them to his children. He intended those children to leave them to theirs. He intended the bluegrass to keep feeding cattle and the limestone springs to keep feeding wells long after he was gone.”
“He could not have imagined that in 2025 one of those water sources would be filtered through Italian mosaic tile.”
More laughter.
“But I think he would have appreciated the efficiency.”
This time, even my mother smiled.
“My family will continue to be your western neighbors.”
“We will continue to run cattle.”
“We will continue to bring up the next generation of Pickwicks on this land.”
“The pool will continue, for the life of its concrete shell, to be the most expensive cattle watering structure in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”
“You are welcome, with appropriate advance notice, to come see it.”
“Thank you for having us.”
The room applauded.
Not wildly.
Sincerely.
Wallace handed me a small glass of Woodford County bourbon.
He raised his glass.
“To fences in the right place.”
Everyone drank to that.
Charity and her husband, Pearson, sold their Lot 1 home in August for three point one million dollars.
The buyers were a Louisville couple who had specifically wanted to live in what they called “the famous cattle pool neighborhood.”
That amused Lincoln for weeks.
The Whittingtons moved to St. Petersburg, Florida.
They did not contact me.
I did not contact them.
Some endings do not require conversation.
Under Wallace’s presidency, Bourbon Springs reduced annual dues by twenty-three percent.
They created a fifteen-thousand-dollar annual contribution to the Woodford County Cattlemen’s Association.
They added a bylaw prohibiting HOA-funded construction within five hundred feet of the western property line without written consent from the Pickwick family.
Wallace said it was unnecessary because no sensible board would make the same mistake twice.
Greta told him sensible boards are not guaranteed by nature.
The bylaw passed unanimously.
The pool conversion took place in week three.
We had already disabled electrical components.
Hadley Foreman, a local agricultural contractor who had retrofitted farm water systems for twenty years, came out to inspect it.
When I explained what I needed, he looked at the infinity edge, the hot tub, the fountains, the mosaic tile, and the cattle tracks across the travertine.
Then he laughed for thirty seconds straight.
After that, he got serious.
The chemical filtration system was removed.
The water was drained, flushed, tested, and refilled.
A livestock-grade water supply system was installed drawing from our existing 1958 well.
The fountains were capped and converted to recirculation-free overflow points.
The hot tub was disconnected from heat and turned into an auxiliary trough.
The infinity edge became a drinking ledge.
The underwater lights were removed or sealed.
Hadley completed the work in four days.
Total cost:
Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars.
I paid eleven thousand of it with Charity’s attorney-fee check.
The remaining thirty-two hundred came from working capital.
Sadie said it was the first time Charity had made a useful contribution to herd health.
The water tested perfectly.
Clean.
Cool.
Mineral profile acceptable.
No chemical residue.
No contamination.
The cattle preferred it immediately.
Lincoln started tracking usage because that is what Lincoln does.
By July, we noticed something unexpected.
The cattle using the pool water gained slightly faster than those spending more time in the south pasture tanks.
Not a dramatic difference.
Enough to notice.
Lincoln attributed it to water temperature and accessibility.
The pool water stayed around three degrees cooler during afternoon heat.
The travertine decking warmed in the morning and held comfortable heat into evening.
The herd began using the area not only for drinking but for cooling and resting.
By late July, during hot stretches between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m., the eastern herd spent around three hours a day near the pool.
They drank.
They stood at the edge.
They rested on the warm stone.
Number 17 claimed the area between the hot tub and infinity edge as her preferred spot.
No other animal challenged her.
Leadership has privileges, even among cattle.
The pool aged differently under hooves than it would have under bare feet.
The travertine developed a gentle polish.
The mosaic tile held up better than expected.
The infinity edge took on small marks from daily use, not damage exactly, but evidence.
That mattered to me.
Objects should show the truth of their service.
A year later, I sat on the back porch of the 1859 farmhouse with my mother Genevieve and watched my grandson Granville chase a green tree frog in circles around the side yard.
He had named the frog Daisy.
Nobody knew why.
He wore navy overalls Auden bought him for his third birthday.
The herd was at two hundred and forty-six head that spring.
The pool was fully integrated into daily rotation.
It had become ordinary.
That was the strangest part.
For a few months, it was a story.
Then it became infrastructure.
Cattle do not care about irony.
They care about water.
And shade.
And footing.
And whether the lead heifer says the place is safe.
By all their measures, the pool had passed.
That same year, we founded two things.
The Granville Pickwick Bluegrass Apprenticeship at the University of Kentucky.
Four thousand dollars a year to a Woodford County High School graduate entering animal husbandry, agricultural sciences, or veterinary medicine.
The first recipient was Rilla Lahan from Versailles, a seventeen-year-old whose father trained thoroughbreds and whose mother ran an organic produce stand.
She wrote me a thank-you letter in careful blue ink.
She said she wanted to become a large-animal vet because cows and horses deserved doctors who were not afraid of mud.
I liked her immediately.
The second was the Genevieve Pickwick Multigenerational Farming Fund, administered through Auden’s law firm.
It provides pro bono legal support to small central Kentucky family farms facing property encroachment, unauthorized infrastructure, expired easement disputes, or pressure from developers and HOAs.
We seeded it with seventy-five thousand dollars from settlement money related to the dispute.
My mother objected to having her name on it.
Then she read the first intake letter from an elderly widow in Madison County whose neighbor had moved a fence six feet west over twenty years.
After that, she said the fund could keep her name.
Auden was promoted to junior partner in March.
Her agricultural property practice doubled.
She still answers my calls on the second ring.
Lincoln and Estelle had their first child in October.
A girl.
They named her Tabitha after the woman who wanted bluegrass land before any Pickwick man understood how badly the family would need it.
Tabitha was born at 8:14 p.m. on a warm Tuesday.
Seven pounds, four ounces.
My mother inspected her in the hospital recovery room and announced she had the Pickwick first-daughter dimple.
Sadie cried.
I held Tabitha for an hour and a half.
Lincoln sat in the visitor’s chair and watched quietly.
Estelle slept.
When Tabitha was one month old, Lincoln drove her down to the eastern pasture in a carrier secured to the four-wheeler.
He told me later that Number 17 looked up from the pool, stared at the baby for several seconds, then went back to drinking.
He described it as recognition.
I described it as cattle curiosity.
Sadie said both could be true.
Wallace Holmstead became a friend.
That surprised me, though it should not have.
Friendship in later life often starts less with shared hobbies and more with shared relief.
He had spent years watching Charity turn a neighborhood into an argument.
I had spent years receiving her letters.
After the recall, we found we liked the same things.
Coffee.
Plain speech.
Quiet mornings.
Grandchildren.
Land that has a use.
He comes down the gravel road every few weeks with a jar of Greta’s homemade quince jelly.
Sadie says it is the best she has ever tasted.
Wallace and I have spent forty hours on porches, in pastures, at cafés, and along the fence line.
Three times, he has brought his twin grandsons to watch the cattle drink from the pool.
Every time, one of them asks, “Grandpa, are those cows drinking out of a swimming pool?”
And every time, Wallace says, “Yes, boys. They are very lucky cows.”
I sleep well now.
I did not sleep well during the forty-three days between Sven Borgman’s survey and Judge Carrington’s order.
There were two worries.
The first was legal.
Courts sometimes surprise you.
Even when the law is clear, a judge can find a narrow procedural reason to slow the truth down.
The second worry was personal.
I wondered if converting the pool would become a small, petty satisfaction I would regret ten years later.
That matters.
An old man can win and still become smaller in the winning.
On day thirty-eight, Sadie sat with me at the kitchen island over a glass of bourbon.
She listened to me say what I had not said out loud.
Then she said, “Annis, the pool is going to water cattle for the rest of your life.”
I looked at her.
“The herd is going to enjoy it. Granville is going to grow up riding down there with you to watch them drink. Auden is going to help other farmers because of this. Lincoln is going to improve herd management because of it. Your mother is going to laugh every time she sees a photograph of Number 17 on that blue tile.”
She took my hand.
“You are not going to regret it.”
She was right.
I slept better that night.
I slept better after the order.
I sleep well now.
Here is what I learned.
The law does not have to be loud to be strong.
A boundary does not have to shout to hold.
A quiet title action can do more than anger.
A fence can say everything that needs saying.
Kentucky fixtures doctrine had been sitting in plain sight for generations, waiting for the day a luxury HOA built permanent concrete six feet inside a cattle pasture and discovered that confidence is not a substitute for a survey.
Charity Whittington did not fall because I shouted.
I did not shout.
She fell because Granville Pickwick bought land in 1851 and his descendants kept the records.
She fell because my daughter read the law correctly.
She fell because Sven Borgman placed a GPS point where a lie had been poured into concrete.
She fell because Judge Carrington understood that property lines matter.
She fell because Wallace Holmstead had enough decency left to help his community turn around.
She fell because Number 17 lowered her head over an infinity edge at 2:14 on a Tuesday afternoon in May and drank like the water had always been meant for her.
The real victory was not humiliating Charity.
Humiliation fades.
The real victory was turning trespass into use.
It was watching my grandson chase a frog named Daisy while cattle drank from Italian tile in the distance.
It was seeing Bourbon Springs residents become neighbors instead of spectators.
It was hearing my mother say, after her first visit to the converted pool, “Your father would have told that story every Sunday until he died.”
It was giving Auden’s law practice a case she could use to protect other farms.
It was proving, quietly and permanently, that land still remembers who belongs to it.
The pool is still there.
The cattle still drink from it.
The travertine is hoof-polished now.
The hot tub is an auxiliary trough.
The infinity edge works better for Angus than it ever would have for people holding cocktails.
Number 17 still claims the warm spot between the hot tub and the ledge.
The clubhouse still sits on the hill beyond the fence.
Sometimes residents walk down with permission and watch from the proper side.
They take photographs.
They laugh.
They ask questions about cattle.
They learn something about land, law, and the danger of building before checking where the boundary actually lies.
And every so often, when the evening light turns the water blue and the herd gathers in a slow black line along the edge, I think about my great-great-grandmother Tabitha.
The woman who wanted a piece of bluegrass of her own.
I think she would understand.
Some land is worth waiting for.
Some lines are worth defending.
And sometimes the most expensive swimming pool in the county becomes exactly what it should have been all along.
A place where the animals drink, the grass keeps growing, and the people on the hill finally learn to stay on their own side of the fence.
