I remember the morning well. I was headed over to the next town to get a haircut and I passed two sheriff deputy's cars headed into my neighborhood. "Something's up this morning!" I said to myself.

Haircut appointment completed, I headed back to the ranch and found the destination of the two squad cars. The two deputies were at a house near me, which also had about five other cars parked in the road which had never been there before.

About an hour later I drove by to see what was up and it was more a case of what was out. Everything in the house was strewn and stacked in the front yard. All of the cars were gone except for one. I said to myself "I guess the family will be back with a truck to pick this stuff up." The truck never came and the furniture and assorted possessions sat through several rainstorms over a week's time until one day a garbage truck arrived and roughly half of the furniture and items were loaded into the truck and crushed. The other half apparently met the same fate, but I wasn't around to witness it.

I don't have the full story about this eviction, but I believe the family of four had been renting the house. Surprisingly, they had been evicted from another house about three years earlier which they were also renting and in that earlier situation I knew the owner who was renting to them. Apparently, after almost eight years of paying their rent on time they simply stopped and it took nearly half a year to evict the family and I believe the owner never collected any back rent at all.

We have not experienced any severe shortages of rain in our region that approach other parts of the nation, but the area has seen its share of foreclosures on a scale never seen before in the half century I have lived here. For the individuals involved in evictions, there is clearly a "money" drought.

 My photo of the house taken several days after the eviction proceedings:

 Story and photo are © 2012 by B+Co., Inc.