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IT HAPPENS TO BE AN INTENSELY gray day. Dusk is falling. It's going to fall right down there where the blackness of my spirits are puddling. Aaaarrgh. I'm not sure I've even got enough "look on the sunny side" to detail the events of the visit to the magistrate's office this afternoon, Dear Reader, where my less-than-ideal tenant arrived and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then commenced to fling falsehoods far and wide.

Not content with that, she was pretty skilled at condemnation, as well. "You," she maintained quite loudly and repeatedly, "are a liar! " Followed by, "And you know it!" By her book, I KNEW that I turned off her water on Christmas Day in order to force her to leave. I KNEW that her boyfriend was not living with her. I KNEW that I'd cooked up all kinds of crazy schemes to give her the boot. Most of all I KNEW that I was lying! The litany was long and creative and spoken emphatically. But, between you and me, Dear Reader, what I knew was this:

Without any other witness to testify for the prosecution (alas, me) it mattered not what I knew or didn't know, what I said or didn't say. It was all merely chatter. This whole hearing was a futile case of she said-she said. When the judge had finished listening to the landlord and the tenant, she knew who was telling the truth. She castigated the landlord for not bringing another tenant to verify her story.

To the tenant she said, You may stay if you pay the rent.


Leaving the building, my tenant looked back with a very wide smirk on her face,"Come on and get yer rent," she told me. "I won't answer the door."

I said nothing and she added: "Come get it tomorrow!"

We all have our skills. My tenant is experienced at this;
until a few hours ago, I was not.

......