Curtis checked the push-mower blade with his thumb and wiped the oil off on his jeans. The rider would do his own yard and the Creech place and the two lots past the fire hydrant. Terrence's lot got the push mower, because the ground still dipped where the crawlspace had been and the rider scalped it every time.
Twelve years of mowing and the depression hadn't filled. The slab came out in '52 and the ground kept the shape of what had been under it, a shallow bowl that held water for days after a storm. Soft rush grew in the low center in thick clumps. He'd stopped cutting through them around year eight.
He laid the loppers and the hand saw on the tailgate next to two pairs of gloves and the flat-head shovel. The sweetgum along the back fence needed its suckers knocked back before they got woody enough to argue with.
Denise's rental was in the driveway, drawing off the roof. She'd gotten in past eleven and gone straight to the back bedroom with a hug and a glass of water. He could hear the house doing nothing behind him, which meant she was awake and looking at her phone.
Down the block, Pat Suggs had her card table out on the Whitfield lot. The laminated map was already flat, held at the corners with river stones. Pat updated it every year with a dry-erase marker: who kept which lot, what was planted, what had come down over the storm season. She'd been doing the map since before it was a map. Before that it was a list on a clipboard. Before that it was people showing up with mowers on the same Saturday because somebody had to.
Seven houses on this block. There'd been nineteen when Curtis was Denise's age. Sweetgum and red maple volunteers along the back fences were twenty feet in places now, throwing afternoon shade across yards that used to bake. Wax myrtle had filled in between his property and the old Creech place, dense enough in leaf to make a wall. When you cut it the leaves gave off a sharp resinous smell that stuck to your clothes and your mower and the dog, if the dog walked through the clippings.
Curtis's house sat three feet higher than it used to. County raised it in '58, after the second time water came through in six years. The pilings showed from the street and the front steps were pressure-treated lumber that still hadn't grayed all the way. From the porch he could see across the Whitfield lot and the Creech lot and Terrence's lot to where the buffer started, and past the buffer to the water. The water was closer than when his father built the original porch. You'd only catch it if you'd been looking at the same view for fifty years.
He heard the screen door.
"Coffee's on the counter," he said without turning.
"I saw." Denise came down the new steps in the old way, skipping the second one, though the second one wasn't the same second one anymore. "When does it start?"
"Pat's out."
"I mean when does everybody come."
"People come when they come."
She looked at him like he'd said something strange. There had never been a time. People mowed when the dew burned off and the light was good and they'd had enough coffee. But she'd been in Charlotte nine years, where things had times.
Pat had a three-ring binder now. Plastic sleeves, a page for each lot: parcel number, family name, years of occupancy, a photograph of the house if one existed, and a line labeled CURRENT KEEPER with a name and a date. Some pages had two or three keepers listed, crossed out and written over. Below the names, notes in different handwriting. Drainage cleared. Sweetgum suckers cut back. Rush clumps spreading.
"Morning, baby." Pat didn't look up from her dry-erase corrections. "Your daddy's got you on Terrence's lot?"
"I guess so."
"You guess right. Sign the sheet if you're working. County wants the log."
The sheet was new too, a sign-in with columns for name, lot number, hours, activity. Denise printed her name and stood there a second with the pen before she put it down.
Carl and his grandson had the two lots past the hydrant, Carl on the mower and the boy dragging a rake behind him with the exaggerated seriousness of a seven-year-old who'd been told this mattered. Across the street a woman Denise didn't recognize was pulling English ivy off a loblolly pine that had come up through what used to be the Morrisons' front walk. The pine was fifteen feet tall. The ivy was winning.
Somebody had set up a canopy tent on the corner lot. Folding table, cooler, a speaker playing nothing yet.
She walked down to Terrence's lot. Her father was already push-mowing the high side where the ground was firm, cutting neat rows in toward the depression. The rush stood in the middle of it. At the back of the lot the sweetgum suckers were coming up through last year's leaf litter, red-stemmed, knee-high already.
At the front, at the edge of the old driveway apron that was still there, cracked and grass-seamed but still there, somebody had set a post. Cedar, four feet, with a house number plate bolted to it. 1412. Below the number, a smaller plate.
"Dad."
He killed the mower.
"What is that."
He followed her eyes. "That's the post."
"Since when."
"Since October. The inspector couldn't find the parcel line. I put it up so he'd quit walking through my tomatoes."
"It has two plates."
Curtis pulled his gloves off. "Says Boone keeps this lot for the Davis family. County wanted to know who to call."
The post was plumb and neatly set, with a small mound of packed gravel at the base. It looked like it had been there a lot longer than October.
"Terrence know about it?"
"Terrence helped me pick the plates. Drove up from Fayetteville." Curtis put his gloves back on. "He sends me his list every February. What to cut, what to leave."
She didn't say anything else about the post. She went to the tailgate and got the loppers.
The argument this year was the Jennings lot.
A couple named Reyes had bought the house on the other side of it two years back. They wanted to keep it. They'd been mowing it anyway since they moved in, on their own, and now they had a rain garden plan — native plants, a shallow basin to catch what came off the road, stepping stones connecting their yard to the lot behind. They'd brought a printed diagram.
"It's a good plan," Pat said, looking at it.
"It's a real good plan." Carl hadn't looked at it. "They don't know the Jennings."
"Does anyone?" Mrs. Reyes was standing very straight, holding the diagram with both hands. "Because nobody's been keeping it. It gets mowed."
"County mows it," Pat said. "That's different."
"The Jennings moved to Goldsboro in '48." Curtis was eating off a plate somebody had handed him. Potato salad, a piece of chicken, a slice of tomato out of somebody's lot garden. "Linda Jennings comes most years. She didn't come last year."
"She was sick last year," Pat said.
"She was sick," Curtis agreed. "Point being she comes. Somebody's going to keep it, she ought to say so."
"Can we ask her?"
"You can ask her. I've got her number."
Mr. Reyes was already getting his phone out. Carl's grandson had quit raking to watch, in the way kids watch when they've figured out that something is being decided. The ivy woman had drifted over and stood at the edge of the group with her arms crossed. Pat had the marker in one hand and the binder in the other.
"What if she says yes?" Mrs. Reyes asked.
"Then you're the keeper. I put your name in the book."
"And if she says no?"
Pat looked at Curtis. Curtis ate his potato salad.
"Then county keeps mowing it," Pat said. "And we talk about it again next year."
"We've been mowing it two years." Mrs. Reyes wasn't angry. She was working out the shape of the thing. "Better than county mows it."
"You have," Curtis said. "That's true."
"So what are we missing?"
He set the plate down on the card table. He looked at the Jennings lot, which was flat and clean and level and had no post and no dip in the ground, no rush, no volunteers, because the Reyes had been keeping it that way on purpose for two years. It looked good. It looked like a plan.
"You're not missing anything," he said. "You're just new."
He picked the plate back up. Mrs. Reyes looked at her husband, the diagram still in both hands. Pat wrote something in the binder that Denise, over on Terrence's lot with the loppers, couldn't see.
By noon the block had the sound it got once a year. Mowers going on three lots at once. Carl's grandson had abandoned the rake and was running in a straight line across three properties, which you could do here. Nothing to stop you. The lots ran together, mowed grass and rush clumps and volunteer trees and the cracked driveways going nowhere.
A woman Denise didn't know brought her a bottle of water and said, "You're Curtis's daughter," and Denise said yes, and the woman said, "Your daddy keeps this lot so nice," and moved on to the next lot where somebody else was working.
Denise drank the water and looked at the post. Terrence had driven up from Fayetteville to pick out two metal plates for a piece of ground the county owned. She almost asked her father whether it had all gotten to be too much, but she knew what he'd say. Too much of what.
She went back to the suckers. Cut sweetgum smelled green and medicinal, and the sap got on the lopper blades and the gloves and wouldn't come off without mineral spirits. Her father had pointed out the poison ivy on the back fence, the three-leafed vine working up the old chain link, and she was giving it room.
At the corner of the lot, the crepe myrtle that had come back off the roots of Terrence's mother's crepe myrtle was leafing out. Curtis pruned it and did not cut it down. Technically it was a new tree growing out of an old root system, which Curtis said was a distinction without a difference.
Curtis was down in the depression with the flat-head shovel, opening the channel that ran from the low point to the roadside ditch. It silted in every winter. He cleared it every spring. The silt came up gray-brown and smelled like iron and like ground that had been wet a long time and had no complaint about it. He lifted a shovelful onto the bank and went back for the next one.
The rush stood around him, green and upright, the stems catching light. He could hear Denise behind him working the fence line. She had a rhythm. He could tell from the sound that she was cutting clean and low, the way he'd shown her, and he didn't turn around to check, because checking would have meant something he didn't intend.
Down the block Pat was walking the lots with her clipboard, holding the map against the ground. Carl's grandson had found a second kid somewhere and the two of them were running now, crossing and separating. The ivy woman had given up on the ivy and was eating chicken under the tent. The Reyes were out on the Jennings lot with a tape measure.
Water moved in the channel when he cleared it, a slow shift toward the ditch, toward the road, toward the creek that would carry it the rest of the way. He set the shovel and straightened up and looked at the lot. The mowed part. The rush. The pile of suckers at the fence. The crepe myrtle. The post.
The ground under his boots was soft and it was not his ground and it was not Terrence's ground. The deed said Pitt County. He cleared the channel every April because the water needed somewhere to go and he was the one who was here.
He heard the loppers behind him. He picked up the shovel.
- Checkerboard lots, fragmented services: A Congressional Research Service overview found that voluntary buyouts can produce scattered vacant parcels that fragment communities and complicate municipal service delivery for remaining residents.
- What grows on buyouts: A 2025 study of over 3,400 federally acquired parcels found that many sites remain "stuck in maintenance" as mowed lawns rather than returning to floodplain function, with land cover ranging from gardens to early forest depending on whether anyone keeps cutting.
- Pitt County's leasing program: Adjacent landowners in eastern North Carolina can already lease acquired buyout lots for a one-time fee of ten dollars, shifting routine mowing and care to neighbors willing to maintain several parcels.
- Memorials are rare but wanted: A peer-reviewed study of physical buyout memorials across four U.S. sites found that the vast majority of acquired floodplain parcels carry no marker at all, even where former residents have expressed the desire for one.