On Thursday, April 23, at 6:20 in the evening, I stood at my back fence with a lemonade and watched two utility employees plant orange flags in a perfectly straight line thru my tomato bed, and one of them waved at me the way you wave at a person whose yard you are legally entitled to cross. The flags mark a twelve-foot easement that has run through this backyard since 1961. I'm paid $60 a year for it. Every spring they come. Every spring I watch.
the week I almost walked away
When I snagged the place in 2021, the easement felt enormous: my lender's underwriter flagged it, my mortgage rate offer sat at 6.3 percent with no room to breathe, and I spent one awfully tense week believing the word easement meant the power company owned my backyard and could picnic on it at will. The deed said otherwise. So did a title officer named Ruth, who talked me thru the actual grant language on a Tuesday call while I took notes like a court stenographer. Twelve feet wide. Transmission feed. My land, their narrow right to cross it.
the shed I never built
The grant gives the utility the right to enter, maintain, replace, and clear within those twelve feet, which translates, in real life, to one inspection walk each spring, occasional pole work, and a standing rule that anything I build inside the strip can be removed without compensation. No shed. No fence across it without gates. No pool, though a pool was never happening on my salary regardless. They plant nothing, mow nothing, and leave the strip alone the other 353 days of the year, which is why my tomatoes have absorbed to live one ruler's width outside the line.
the ten-day letter every April
The ritual is strangely formal. Ten days before any entry, a notice arrives — this year's came April 11, postmarked, with a job number and a crew window — then the flags appear, then the crew, then a clipboard signature confirming they came and went without disturbing so much as a tomato cage. The notice is my favorite piece of mail. It is the only document I own that announces, in writing, the exact day strangers will be polite in my yard.
the laminated map
This year's visit took eleven minutes. The senior tech carried a laminated map with my parcel outlined in marker, told me the line beneath the tomatoes feeds forty-one houses including mine, and stepped over my irrigation line twice without being told it existed. My backyard is politely load-bearing for the back half of the street. He complimented the stakes. I told him they were easement-compliant, and he wrote something on his clipboard that I have decided to take as a compliment.
One visit skipped the letter, and the grant allows it: February 2023, a windstorm snapped a crossarm two poles over, and a crew came thru at 5:40 in the morning with headlights raking my fence line, no notice, because emergencies are carved out of the ten-day rule in the awfully same paragraph. Ninety minutes, one new pole, gone before my coffee finished. I found tire tracks and a thank-you voicemail. The system flexes when it must. It just refuses to flex quietly, and that is the part I have come to respect about it.
$60, seven times
The $60 arrives every spring like a modest apology from 1961, a check with my name misspelled two years out of seven, and I cash it immediately, cuz my mother raised no fools. Seven checks so far. $420 in total, which offsets nothing and funds everything that matters in that bed — tomato plants, cages, one bag of soil each season — so the power company is, in the narrowest possible sense, my garden's sponsor. I zeroed in on that framing the first spring, and it has kept me warm since.
the HELOC pitch at 8.9 percent
A bank pitched me a HELOC in 2024 — 8.9 percent, cheerful, for a kitchen remodel I had talked myself into and back out of three times — and the appraiser walked the backyard, glanced at the April flags, and noted the easement on his sheet without moving a single comparable. Comps with easements price the same as comps without, at least on this street. He said it shrugging. His spreadsheet said it first.
what the appraiser shrugged at
The loan I skipped. The information I kept. Twelve feet of my land is worth exactly what my land is worth, with no discount, cuz every buyer on this street since 1961 has lived with the flags and the market stopped charging anyone for them decades ago. That reframing did more for how I own the place than the check does. An encumbrance turned into a quirk with a dividend.
the best sixty-dollar relationship I know
The crew packed up at 6:31, eleven minutes after the first flag went in, and the line of orange stood in my yard like a sentence someone else had punctuated while I drank my lemonade down to the last ice. May will bring the check. The tomatoes will climb their compliant stakes. And next April, around the 11th, a postmarked notice will land in the mailbox ten days ahead of two people in vests who have every legal right to cross my land and nothing but good manners in their pockets when they do — the best $60 relationship I know.
