The land buyer laughed as he snatched the clipboard from the young farmer's hand and threw it into the mud beside the pond.
"These ponds are dead! Sell me this worthless land before you lose your father's house too!"
The twenty-eight-year-old woman stared at the clipboard lying in the wet soil.
Her father's handwritten measurements were scattered across its pages, and the corner of an old photograph protruded from beneath the bent metal clip.
She had spent the entire morning trying to explain why the ponds weren't worthless.
Now the fifty-eight-year-old businessman standing before her was laughing as though the last six years of her father's life had been some ridiculous joke.
The woman stood at the edge of the largest pond wearing a black-and-green plaid flannel shirt, fitted blue denim overalls, cream-colored work gloves, and muddy brown farm boots.
Her long chestnut-brown hair was tied into a loose ponytail, with several strands escaping around her pale, exhausted face.
Beyond her stretched forty-six acres of neglected Iowa farmland.
Three enormous ponds occupied the southern portion of the property, surrounded by reeds, old fencing, and cracked earthen embankments.
The water looked dull and gray beneath the overcast afternoon sky.
For six years, no fish had been harvested from them.
No customers had visited.
No boats had crossed their surfaces.
And nearly everyone in the surrounding county believed the ponds were permanently ruined.
The buyer folded his arms across his brown plaid shirt.
"Your father wasted his retirement trying to bring these mud holes back to life. Don't make the same mistake."
The woman bent to retrieve the clipboard.
The man placed one boot directly in front of it.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you."
She slowly straightened.
Her green eyes glistened, but her voice remained steady.
"Get your boot off my father's papers."
The businessman smirked.
"Still pretending those papers are worth something?"
She didn't answer.
He stepped closer.
"I offered you fourteen thousand dollars for land the county won't even certify as productive aquaculture property. You should be thanking me."
The woman looked past him toward the farmhouse.
It was a beautiful but weathered two-story building with peeling white paint, a wraparound porch, and a red barn leaning slightly toward the western field.
Her father had built most of that porch himself.
Her mother had planted the flowering bushes beside the steps.
And the little window above the kitchen sink still faced the ponds where she'd spent so many afternoons with her father as a child.
She couldn't imagine surrendering the property for fourteen thousand dollars.
But the bills were accumulating.
The bank was asking questions.
And the attorney handling her father's estate had warned that the next several months would require difficult financial decisions.