The woman I call Mrs. Wilson is leaving my park in northern New York – but nothing is simple with Mrs. Wilson.
Readers might remember her. She shovels snow in high heels in the North Country when she claims to be in Alabama. She chained herself to a tree. She makes herself bulletproof by accusing men of sexual harassment. She brings out the worst in me by making my neurotransmitters pop.
She doesn’t bother me as much as she bothers Mike, the manager of that park. Mike thinks she is a slob. I think her lot is decorated in Hippie Chic. I usually don’t think much about her, because she pays most of her lot rent most of the time, and I don’t have to interact with her in person. I am the REMF. Mike is on the front line.
Things went pear-shaped last month. She skipped a lot rent payment. I sent a five-day demand and then a thirty-day notice. She was served by nail-and-mail. Her grandchild knocked on neighbors’ doors asking for food because there was nothing to eat in his house. CPS took the boy away. Her daughter and son-in-law’s dog was left alone in the home for a period of several days. Animal control was called to check up on the problem.[1]
Then, Mike told me that Mrs. Wilson had texted him to say that she would sign her home over to the park if we forgave her lot rent debt. All we had to do was email her the paperwork. We gave each other a high five and said, ‘Sure’.
Since the main event is out of town, we spoke with her daughter and son in law, who are staying in the home. Mrs. Wilson was a good-looking woman when she was young. Her daughter looks like a twenty-five year old version of her, with tattoos on her arms, fingers and Adam’s apple. The son-in-law is a little older. His red hair is beginning to go gray at the edges. He wears rectangular reading-type glasses and has an Abraham Lincoln-type beard with no moustache. When we spoke with them, they were cordial and agreed to sign a release, although they told us that Mrs. Wilson would have to sign the bill of sale, because the home was in her name. They had just returned from a long walk back from the CPS office, where they had discussed custody of their son.
Where is she now, I asked the son-in-law.
Kentucky, he said.
As he spoke, the dog yowled and escaped into the yard. Since Animal Control had visited, someone had taped a hand-written notice that read ‘Dog is taken care of’ to the front door. I ignored the dog as it gnawed on a traffic cone.
Not Alabama?, I asked.
Sometimes it’s Alabama, sometimes it is Kentucky, sometimes Tennessee.
Is she really in those places, or does she just change her story, like an electron?
She just says that. She’s retarded.
You’re not supposed to say that now.
I asked if we could get Mrs. Wilson’s email address, so that we could send her the documents, as she had asked us to do when she offered to sign over the home. The son-in-law fumbled with their Netflix account on his phone.
We used her email to set up the account, he said. It pops up when I log in.
Do you remember what it was, I asked.
Hottie98 at something.
Imagining the term ‘hottie’ and Mrs. Wilson in the same cognitive space made me bite my tongue. She was attractive once, but those days are over. And fifty-year-olds should not use terms like ‘hottie’.
Is it yahoo or gmail, I asked.
Something else, he said. Some one you’ve never heard of.
What happened with your visit to CPS?
They are assholes.
After we finished, I googled the daughter and son-in-law. The daughter has an onlyfans account. Someone with a middle and last name that are the same as the son-in-law’s first and last name was convicted of first-degree murder in 2015. The murder happened in Pennsylvania, but the victim rented an apartment with the accused in the town in northern New York where the park is located. When I googled further, I saw that the murderer was sentenced to several decades in prison. The judge who sentenced him said that the man who went to prison had the sensibility of a serial killer, and that it was lucky that he had been caught when he was young. The name shared by the son-in-law and the killer are is fairly common. Given the totality of what I could find online, I decided that it is more likely that the son-in-law shares a name with the murderer than that he killed a young man with whom he shared an apartment in town in a horrific premeditated act in Pennsylvania eight years ago.
I do not think that I will get an email response from Mrs. Wilson. Since she has disappeared, she has no incentive to sign her name to the bill of sale and the release. The only reason why she would sign would be to avoid a money judgment for the lot rent that she owes – but she knows how to play the system. Courts can’t get blood from a turnip, let alone a turnip that is moving between three unknown locations south of the Mason Dumbass Line at an undeterminable velocity. I would like to scrap her home and clear the lot for another TRU home as soon as possible, but I would not be surprised if she showed up four months from now to claim the home and to accuse me of destroying her property. She is, after all, Schrödiner’s Redneck. Instead, I will wait six months and then institute an abandoned property proceeding to clear title to the home. I have never done that before. This will be an opportunity for me to learn that process.
Most people remember the sections of the Declaration of Independence that constitute sweeping statements about self-evident truths, the Course of Human Events, and just powers derived from the consent of the governed. The majority of the document, however, is an enumeration of specific causes of action. These are interesting for people looking to trace the origins of the American Revolution, but they are rhetorically tedious.[2] Every park owner has a Mrs. Wilson. Discussions of Mrs. Wilsons usually degenerate into and-then-she-did-this-and-then-can-you-fucking-believe-it-she-did-it-again,-naked-in-high-heels. They are an important part of running a park, but stories about them can tend toward rhetorical tedium, particularly when you declare independence from a resident who has refused her Assent to Laws, obstructed the Administration of Justice and Quartered large bodies of armed troops among the civilian population.
[1] The dog is a Golden Lab-Pitbull mix. It looks like a Lab, but it behaves like a Pitbull. In a better world, people would use Cocker Spaniels as emotional support animals, rather than Pitbulls.
[2] French people insist that the American Revolution was not a revolution. They say that it was a war of independence. For the French, someone has to be decapitated for an event to be a revolution.
Schrödiner’s Redneck.
I love it.