Jed and Ellie Mae

We have new oil barons in the family. My parents are selling the drilling rights to the natural gas underneath their property for a tidy sum. The actual drilling will be far from their property so it won't change their quality of life. It seems oil drillers have new ways of extracting the natural gas that they are pretty sure exists below Shreveport. Dad says that the mineral rights revert back to you if you've owned your property for more than ten years in Louisiana. Since they've been there since the 50s, I think they're set. If the drillers do find gas, my parents should start getting checks. Momma has started to call Dad "Jed" which makes her either Granny or Ellie Mae. I definitely think she's much more of an Ellie Mae.

Now Michael and I have never owned mineral rights to any property we've ever bought. If I remember correctly, we didn't even really "own" the lot in Hot Springs because it's part of a National Park. We had a hundred-year-lease or something weird like that. And I don't even know if there has been anything valuable under the property we've owned. But if there's anthracite under this house, it's not mine and someone else already has the right to dig a big old tunnel under it to get it out.

We ended up buying a house on the side of a mountain for two reasons. We couldn't bring ourselves to buy a house that might have subsidence problems. This is a nice way of saying that your house might fall into a hole in the ground because of a mine tunnel underneath it. (Which indeed happened to my dad's childhood home.) And we also didn't want to be in a flood zone. Most all of Wilkes-Barre and the other towns that run alongside the Susquehanna are in a flood zone. After seeing the pictures of Iowa City (and the flooding of two different places where we used to live)I think we made a good choice. We got less house for the money, but I feel a lot more secure when it rains.