Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real estate agent came out to see if the adjacent area would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line and had to be removed.

Appraised out, my mother said. Who comes up with these dreadful phrases . . . I agreed that language was becoming uglier the more it was becoming irrelevant to our needs.

My mother took on the task of dismantling everything she had accomplished. She broke up the walls and trucked away the rubble. She even dug out the filled trench. Then she rough-raked the ground and rolled some of the large stones back into place. She left the few flowering shrubs and grasses she had so recently planted but without protection the birds and animals that are so seldom seen quickly consumed them. Such is their need.