The case of Swine v Gump, pending in the Village Court of Wistful Vista, had finally reached the trial stage after two years of exchange of pleadings, two contested motions, discovery, and mutual depositions. The hotly contested and publically debated litigation involved the thorny and complex issue of aggravated trespass and theft (“civil conversion”) of property. Despite the heavy rain, the Village Courtroom, presided over by the Hon. Derwood T. Sprout, an elderly, partially retired Judge from the State Superior Court.
A brief summary of the matters at hand is as follows: The contending parties have been feuding neighbors for many years, having ingeniously discovered numerous reasons to maintain their hostile and contentious relationship. However, the presenting case does appear to involve valid litigatable issues between the two adjoining neighbors. It seems that the plaintiff, Elvira T. Swine, and her husband, J. Throckmorton Swine (no children) planted an expensive bing cherry tree, four years ago at the proprietary edge of their property, adjoining a dividing wood fence, the latter, marking the boundary between the Swine and that of Samuel J. Gump and Cornelia “Carrie” Gump (one son, in Wistful Vista High),
The cherry tree had finally bloomed and produced a substantial number of the long-awaited Bing cherries. The problem, however, was that the substantial tree had blossomed and yielded its copious harvest of fruit only on one side, the fruit-bearing half hanging over the Gump side of the proprietary fence. The Swine side of the broadly expanded tree, bizarrely, yielded no fruit, only bare, leafy branches, to the intense consternation of the Swines.
The two unfriendly neighbors had never presumed to enter upon the adjoining real estate of the other, however, Mr. J. Throckmorton Gump, one late afternoon after working hours, witnessed the alleged trespasser and larsonist., Elvira T. Swine (“fat Elly”) standing (“trespassing”) on his private property, picking cherries from the tree. He angrily shook his fist at her and demanded that she leave. Elvira, tactically and provocatively, ignored Gump’s shouted demand and continued to pick the beautiful red cherries, leaving only after she had filled her small, handheld bucket.
Gump angrily retreated to his house and, in a state of stupefying anger, telephoned his lawyer, Arnold Fensterwald, of Gruenwald and Fensterwald, Attorneys at Law, 10 Loudmouth Circle, Wistful Vista. The next morning, Gump, sleepless and irate, related the facts to the law firm’s young associate, Filbert Nutley, recently admitted to the State Bar. The lawsuit in question was initiated and filed in Court later that week, after Gump had reluctantly agreed to the law firm’s outlandish retainer.
The publically celebrated and hotly contested, non-jury trial, lasted one week, during which the parties testified, the depositions and discovery proceedings incorporated into the record, and representatives of the Real Estate Title Company and the local Agricultural Extention had testified as “expert witnesses.” The legal issue was one created by the necessary weighing of the contested equities existing between the sanctity of private land ownership as compared with the rights of the neighboring party who had planted the fruiting tree within his property line; but acted in the context of disappointment that his long-awaited harvest of fruit appeared to grow only on the boughs of the tree, hanging over the neighbor’s property; thus, raising legal issues as to to its access necessitating a legal trespass and, complicated by recondite issues concerning ownership of the hanging fruit.
After the conclusion of party testimony and the eloquent closing arguments of the respective parties, Judge Sprout, as customary, invited the attorneys to his Chambers to explore the possibility of settlement and avoid the difficult necessity to resolve the presenting legal dilemma. In the course of the conference, the Judge and both attorneys noticed in the photographs of both properties, introduced in evidence during the trial, that both tracts of land were equal in dimension and, even more remarkably, that plaintiff Gump’s house and property were identical in size and appearance to that owned by Swine (presumably. both properties having been built by a common developer). Shortly thereafter, the case was settled to the satisfaction of all parties by the mutual exchange of deeds of ownership to their real estate properties. The luscious Bing cherries could, thereafter, be rightfully harvested by the new owner of the tree.
The following Spring, exactly one year to the day after the effectuation of the settlement, Nature intervened by bizarrely causing the cherries to appear exclusively on the other side of the tree, now by the legal settlement, once more, on Gump property; which ironically bizarre event was ultimately, and mercifully resolved by the complete felling of the perverse tree by a resident beaver family.
Mother Nature, possibly wearing gardening gloves and overalls, had, impatiently and finally, adjudicated the tiresome problem.
-p.
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