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something in reply. But before I had a chance to come up with something witty, he continued. "Just to clarify. Alan? It's Alan? Are you talking on our land, as well as . . . your land?"
    From California to the New York islands . . .
    Suddenly I couldn't get Woody Guthrie out of my head. I like Woody fine, but, I mean, damn. "This Land Is Your Land" was one of those songs that could stick to my dendrites like a wad of gum adheres to the sole of my shoe.
    Mattin Snow, our new neighbor, and my apparent new adversary, at least in matters canine, was a highly regarded attorney. A hugely popular attorney with a fan base that extended from Woody's redwood forests all the way to his Gulf Stream waters. When Lauren and I initially learned that Mattin and his wife had bought Adrienne's house, my wife, also a lawyer, had told me that in her opinion he was in the process of doing for her ever-misunderstood profession what Mehmet Oz had done for medicine.
    At the time of that conversation with Lauren, I didn't know who Mehmet Oz was or what the hell he had done for medicine. But, fortunately, Google did. I learned that Mehmet Oz, M.D., was America's favorite daytime doctor, a surgeon with magic hands, endless wisdom, an extra dose of charisma, a nonjudgmental ear, and apparently, always sound advice for the masses.
    Mattin Snow was a J.D., though, not an M.D. Google links made clear to me that he was teaching his ever-expanding television and Internet audience--primarily women--how to use the law to their advantage. His first book, This Law Is Your Law, was due out just before Christmas. One of the Googled links I'd followed informed me that it was already a national bestseller in preorders on Amazon. I was impressed.
    I was also very aware that it was that Mattin Snow, the attorney Mattin Snow, who was asking me if my big dog, Emily, on her nightly prowls, might have been crossing invisible boundaries between his land and mine. Which meant that my new neighbor was a lawyer hinting at instigating a quarrel with me about leash laws.
    I thought, Oh damn. The truth? I couldn't have identified the property line between Mattin's land and my land--hello again, Mr. Guthrie--even had there been a knife at my throat and a psychotic threat spelled out in neon spittle on the knife-wielding surveyor's lips. I did know that of the twelve acres of ranch land that remained of the expansive homestead that was anchored by Mattin Snow's newly acquired house, my ranch hand's shack sat on a cropper's share that was a skosh more than a solitary acre.
    In Boulder proper, if Boulder has a proper, an acre-plus-sized piece of land would be a rare treasure for a homeowner. But out in rural Boulder County, where we lived in the country on the side of the valley that looks at the Rocky Mountains but isn't in them, ownership of an acre or so would not peg me as an astute real estate operator, but rather as an interloper. An acre was barely a homesite out in this part of the valley, certainly a parcel not significant enough to qualify as a ranchette.
    Many years before, early in our relationship, Peter--the first of my Spanish Hills neighbors and friends to die a tragic death--had educated me about how little of our shared hillside I actually owned. As was Peter's proclivity in such matters, he had gone to great lengths to determine that my legal domain was, in fact, just shy of half a hectare. A hectare, he explained to me, is itself just shy of two and a half acres. We were in his wood shop at the time. Like a professor schooling a recalcitrant pupil, he used white chalk on the not-money side of a full sheet of walnut veneer to show me the arithmetic that proved that the plot to which I held title--one that had been carved out of the larger ranch when the lovely woman who had been my landlord of many years agreed to sell me the caretaker's home I'd been renting--was scant a true half hectare by a couple of dozen square meters.
    I wasn't as fascinated by the lesson as