While I spent my days alternating between my job and caring for the farm livestock my parents secretly negotiated with a representative from Prairie Sun Renewables. Mom intended to sell the entire farm property to finance assisted living for Grandpa Walt and purchase a lake house for herself. Paige visited me at the farm and confessed she had always been told I voluntarily stayed behind because I hated traveling. She also discovered Mom had drained forty four thousand dollars from my college fund to pay for her own dance trips. That evening my parents confronted me at the farmhouse with a title report showing that Walter Kessler only owned two hundred acres. The documents revealed that I was the actual owner of the remaining four hundred forty acres including the main house and barns. I finally opened my red coffee can and poured the eleven brass washers onto the property map. The mysterious stamped hardware pieces perfectly matched the land tract numbers for the fields where Grandpa Walt and I had worked together for all those years.
Grandpa Walt had his attorney Mr. Barlow present me with an accordion folder containing eleven legally recorded property deeds and a certified receipt proving Mom knew her power of attorney was revoked six years earlier. During the Monday court hearing Judge Thornberry reviewed all the documents and noted that Grandpa Walt was perfectly competent to manage his own affairs. Grandpa Walt testified that he transferred the acreage to me over eleven summers because he wanted my hard work acknowledged through something permanent that nobody could ever take away. The judge completely denied the conservatorship petition and ordered my parents to pay all legal expenses. The solar development collapsed and my parents quickly returned my stolen college funds without any apology. We brought Grandpa Walt back home on Thursday and Paige decided to follow us in her own car. Grandpa Walt directed us into his machine shop where he found a blank brass washer and smiled as he suggested it was time to find out if my sister could handle the morning farm chores.