My brother-in-law spent four months dumping his grass clippings over the fence into my vegetable garden, and laughed about it at a family party in front of twenty-five people. Ten days after the last load, every plant I had started curling in on itself — including a tomato line my father had kept going for forty-four seasons.

The yard went quiet.

Twenty-five people. Trina’s father four feet away with tongs in his hand. Two of my own cousins.

Nobody said one word.

Trina was at the table by the house and she looked at the grass.

And I sat down, and we had the cake, and I did not mention it again, because it was their fortieth anniversary.

That is why it went on another four weeks.

Now. What I actually did, which is not what the person reading this wants and is what happened.

I did not put anything through that fence.

I took the lab report and the four days of photographs and I wrote it up — dates, quantities, the three conversations, the family party, the wheelbarrow — and I sent it to Emerald Tier’s office with the lab result attached.

Not to complain about Emerald Tier. They had done everything right and I said so in the letter.

I sent it to them because a company that applies that chemical has a professional liability policy, and a professional liability policy has a claims department, and a claims department does something that no amount of standing in a driveway does, which is write to the customer.

Emerald Tier’s insurer wrote to Randall Culp in the August.

The letter set out that he had been provided with a written notice, that he had disposed of treated clippings onto adjoining property on multiple occasions after receiving it, and that any claim arising was his and not theirs.

It is four paragraphs long and it is the politest document I have ever read and it took the floor out from under him, because until that letter he had been telling everybody in that family that this was a gardening disagreement.

I did not sue him. I want to be clear that I could have and that Trina asked me not to and that this time I listened, and that this time I think she was right and not just tired.

What he paid for was the remediation. Eleven cubic yards of soil out of two beds, disposal, replacement, and the lab work. Four thousand one hundred and eighty dollars, over ten months, and he has paid every one of them on time.

The beds are out of production until the spring after next. That is not something money fixes. The extension agent’s advice was to grow nothing but grasses and corn in them for two seasons and test again, and that is what I am doing.