Lucy and Ethel in a Candy Factory

                                    

                                          
Aside from some occasional hikers, "birders," and "hedgehog hunters," most days the woods surrounding my house were pretty empty of people. This kind of undeveloped open space will probably be an unknown luxury in a generation or two, something future people will look back on with wonder that such a thing could ever have been, like the Age of Chivalry. It seems as if everywhere you go, developments keep on multiplying, ever faster and faster, and nature probably feels like Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory, with all of us piling up on the assembly line.
                          
So, when I went up the hill to mail my electrified letter, I was a bit concerned to find a small crew wearing identical yellow reflective vests and setting up strange equipment on the side of the road. They looked like a starship away team. One guy was adjusting a tripod with a futuristic spyglass mounted on it. A few feet away, a woman was holding up a thin red and white pole with a Frisbee-sized disc on top. It might have been some kind of metal detector, pointed up at the sky. Maybe she was scanning the clouds for silver linings. 
                          
Another crew member was standing near my mailbox holding a little device that looked like a tricorder, as if checking for alien life signs. I told him that as far as I knew, my mailbox was Terran in origin, and in any event it was almost certainly not dangerous. He looked skeptical.
                          
In order to mail my letter, I had to straddle a foot-wide trench that someone—I guess the away team—had dug along the side of the road. There were tiny flags stuck in the trench, like it had been conquered by an army of garden gnomes. 
                          
Tricorder Guy wanted to know what business I had with the mailbox.
                          
"The usual kind?" I told him, unsure what other kind there might be.
                          
He said something about the mailbox being on the wrong side of the trench, that it was "encroaching" on the hill.
                          
I told him the mailbox had definitely not moved since it was put there by the old radicals. It was just a nice peaceful mailbox with no ambitions about invading and conquering. 
                          
He said something about me not actually owning the hill.
                          
I explained that nobody owned the hill anymore, that it had once belonged to a couple of underinsured old radicals, but they'd moved to New Mexico after the smiting of their home.
                          
He smiled and said there was no such thing.
                          
I agreed that it was indeed a surprise to find insured radicals, under- or not.
                          
He said he didn't mean the old radicals.
                          
"Oh," I said, trying not to laugh at his naïveté. I assured him that New Mexico was real, despite being called the Land of Enchantment, and despite having a cartoon character for a state bird.
                          
"No," he said with a long sigh. "No. No such thing as a piece of land that doesn't belong to somebody."