I found myself more than once that week opening a browser tab just to look at photos of the building.
A squat, cheerful, single-story structure with a mural of a sun painted across the front wall, built in 1991 on land that had, a decade earlier, quietly held whatever Halverson Agricultural Holdings hadn't bothered to properly close out.
I thought about every recess, every field day, every parent who dropped a kid off there for over 30 years without a single reason to ask what might be sitting under the playground.
I called the school district's facilities office, unsure exactly what I expected them to say, and ended up on the phone with a maintenance supervisor named Tom Reyes, who'd worked at that particular school for over 20 years.
When I explained why I was calling, there was a long pause before he answered.
"Funny thing," he said. "We had a section of the field out past the baseball diamond that never grew grass right. No matter what we did to it. Reseeded it four, maybe five times over the years. Landscaping guy always said it was probably compacted subsoil from construction. Nobody ever tested it because why would you? Kids play on it, nothing ever happened to anybody, and eventually you just stopped noticing it's there."
He asked me before we hung up whether the testing crew would need access to that section specifically.
I told him I'd pass the request along to Dennis's office, and he thanked me in a tone that made it clear he'd be thinking about that dead patch of grass a lot more carefully from now on, the same way I'd started thinking differently about every patch of warm ground in my own yard.
When Dennis called to tell me the school's soil had come back clean, I felt a version of relief I hadn't expected to feel this intensely over a building I'd never set foot in.
It wasn't my case, not directly.
But it had existed unexamined for 35 years entirely because nobody had ever had a reason to look.
The same reason nobody had looked at my backyard for the first 60 years.
My well sat quietly doing its job.
The only difference between a clean result and a catastrophic one in cases like this seemed to come down to nothing more than luck and the accident of geography.
That thought didn't sit easily with me.
And it still doesn't.
The elementary school testing, when it came back three weeks later, showed nothing.
Clean soil.
No historical contamination.
A genuine relief that made local news for exactly one day.
The shopping plaza site showed trace contamination well below any threshold requiring remediation.
Old.
Inert.
No ongoing risk.
My subdivision site was the only one of the four that came back as an active unresolved hazard requiring full remediation, likely, Dennis explained, because it was the only one that still had an open pressure-relief pathway venting slowly into the surrounding soil.
The exact pathway my well had provided for 60 quiet years before someone decided it was an eyesore.