was still. The dock was handsome. If you did not know what had been cut, redirected, buried, and ignored to create it, you might have thought it belonged there.
That second was dangerous.
That is how encroachment works sometimes. Not with ugliness, but with beauty used as an argument. Once a wrong thing becomes attractive, people start asking whether undoing it is wasteful. They stop asking who had the right to do it in the first place.
I heard my grandfather again.
You let one thing slide, you teach people