I spent more than three decades watching families tear themselves apart over property.

Sometimes the property was valuable.

Sometimes it wasn’t.

I once handled a case involving two brothers who had refused to speak directly for eleven years because of a fishing cabin worth roughly forty thousand dollars. Instead, they paid lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to communicate their resentment.

I watched a divorcing couple spend more fighting over a riding mower than the mower had cost when it was new.

I once listened to a woman cry for nearly an hour over a dining table her mother had restored by hand while her former husband sat across the courtroom wondering whether he could sell it before the court stopped him.

After thirty-one years on the family court bench, I learned something important.

People rarely fight only about the object.

Property becomes a language.

The cabin isn’t really about fishing.

The table isn’t really about furniture.

The argument is usually about love, recognition, sacrifice, control, memory, or the fear that someone else has the power to erase your place in a family.

I understood that professionally for decades.

It took much longer to understand it personally.

My name is Wendy Finch.

I retired from the family court bench at sixty-five, exactly when I had planned to.

I live outside Cedar Falls, Iowa, in the house my late husband Richard built with his own hands.

We bought the land when we were still young enough to think difficult projects were romantic.

Richard wasn’t a contractor.

He was a civil engineer who had grown up in a family where people learned to build things because they could not always afford to hire someone else.

He designed the house himself.

He poured the foundation in 1988.

He finished the final beam three years later.

I still remember the day he stood in the completed kitchen with paint on his shirt and sawdust in his hair.

He looked around with an expression I had never seen before.

Not pride exactly.

Something deeper.

Like he had been imagining the house for so long that seeing it physically exist surprised even him.

His hands were everywhere in that home.

He laid the white oak floors himself.

He built the walnut kitchen cabinets.

He framed the bedroom windows twice because the morning light didn’t fall at the angle he wanted the first time.

That was Richard.

If something mattered, he didn’t settle simply because the first version technically worked.

When our son Derek was nine, Richard brought him into the workshop one Saturday and helped him build a bookshelf.

They used pine because Richard said pine was forgiving for children.

Derek made imperfect cuts.

One joint at the bottom never sat quite straight.

Richard refused to fix it for him.

He showed Derek how to correct what could be corrected and let the rest remain.

The finished shelf leaned slightly to the left.

Derek loved it.

At the end of the weekend, he used Richard’s wood-burning tool to write two shaky words on the back panel.

Dad and me.

That bookshelf stayed in our living room for decades.

Richard died seven years ago.

He was sixty-four.