Guess who I saw today. That’s right, my landlord. And guess what he’s going to do something about. That’s right, the mud.

Early this morning (way too early, for either a Monday or a holiday, much less both), the Boss called and begged me to give him permission to talk to the landlord. I’d been resisting this method of dealing with the problem, mostly because the Boss can sometimes come on a little heavy-handed. (No, really.)

But he promised me that he would be “gentle.” I wasn’t sure how to take that, not knowing if he knew the actual meaning of the word, but he told me he would ask him if he knew about the mud and find out if he had a plan to deal with it. That seemed almost safe to me, so I gave him the name and phone number. Then I closed my eyes and pulled the blanket over my head.

The Boss called back a while later. “He was nice and I was nice,” he said. The landlord has been out of town (which I sort of knew), but now that he’s back he wants to get the problem taken care of. He has a vested interest beyond the rent he collects from me on time every month. There is also a pile of mud and debris blocking the gate to his property, and he wants it gone.

Later this afternoon the landlord himself came knocking on my door, carrying guess what. That’s right, a stack of my mail that had been delivered to his mailbox instead of mine. That’s a little crazy, because there’s no way my carrier could have known it would be delivered to me. So it must have been a mistake, and lucky for me it was a mistake that could be corrected, because if my mail had gone into anyone else’s mailbox on my road, I don’t think I would have it today.

Anyway, he repeated to me the same things he had told the Boss. We exchanged looks of astonishment at how all this had come to pass. He had seen the guy with the truck but assumed he was from the county. I had assumed the guy was working under my landlord’s direction. We were both wrong, but (as I told him), even if the guy wasn’t from the county, he was doing a job the county should have done. Only, he was doing it badly, and I’ve been suffering for two weeks because of it.

So now I’m that much closer to closure. The landlord will follow up with the county. The Boss will follow up with the landlord. If the county doesn’t do anything, the landlord said he would. The Boss told me that if the landlord didn’t take care of it, he would send Tim here with equipment and a crew. So one way or another, I’m on my way to being out of the mud and on to the next problem, whatever that turns out to be.