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By Root 335 0

looking around to see who’s here and who’s where. On the stroke of the hour, the choir files out, the women in their dark green robes, the men in their white shirts and green bow ties. You see a lot of gray heads up there, and some cautious climbing of the risers. The men always look scrubbed up pretty good, with fresh comb tracks in their hair. Somewhere someone is still selling Brylcreem. The women look pleased and pleasant. My mom—wearing her bifocals and with her white hair up in a bun—is there, and so is my sister-in-law Barbara. Barbara’s husband—my brother John—is in the back row stage right, his face windburned and bearded. Dad is also in the back row, stage left. Most everyone has a trace of kindergarten recital stiffness in his posture. The conductor is an animated fellow given to preacher-hopping during the rhythmic parts, and given to hand-waving during the hortative parts, but you grant him latitude because he has himself quite a job there, summoning hosannas from a pack of mannered Midwesterners. During warm-ups I note he sports a scandalous earring, but then he is the leader of the band.

And so they sing for us. I make it to the Christmas concert about every other year, and am always enchanted with the homemade joy of it all. I think of these neighbors getting their work done and hustling through supper so they can make rehearsal on time, giving up their evenings in, their television shows, their early-to-bed. Doing it as fall becomes winter, fighting the first snowy roads. Memorizing their lyrics and learning their parts, with no expectation of remuneration beyond smiling faces and afterward, coffee and cookies. I see the dump truck driver raising his voice to the ceiling panels, hear the administrative assistant weaving her harmony with that of the farm wife, and think at that very moment of the googolplex infinitude of electrified screens and bangety-bang speakers blasting away at the world, and we are blessed indeed to be in this small space, with our neighbors singing for us. The music swells from worshipful chorale to hand-clapping swing, up and down, the tempo of the piece following the tempo of the tale. The music builds and builds, soaring to the point where I am rocking in my seat and bobbing my head some when my gaze shifts to Dad in the backmost row, and it hits me as a soft shock that he looks small up there. Still the bright eyes, still the wrestler’s physical alacrity, but he is favoring one knee, and after years of little change, his hair has gone gray and gone thin. Right around his pop-out ears—the ones Mom swears she never noticed until someone mentioned it—the hair is tufted and a tad askew, so that when he peers through big glasses to see the music and sings with his eyebrows raised like he’s been surprised by the next note, he’s all absentminded-professor-looking. But more than that, the oversize glasses and the green bow tie render him childlike, even as I realize: that’s my dad, becoming an old man.

Here on the new place there is much to do. Most of our things are still in boxes. A goodly bunch of the rest of our things are still in the New Auburn house. As far as self-sufficiency, Anneliese and I are doing our best to aim low—some eggs, some pork chops, some firewood; if we can raise just a portion of the heat and groceries by our own hand this first year, it will be an improvement on years previous. There is also the small matter of me nattering on about how I intend to be a subsistent man of the land even as I spend a quarter of the year ramming around the country with a trunkload of books. This is hardly proper behavior for a father, a husband, or a husbandman.

Also, we have a baby on the way. Due in early spring. Anneliese has proposed the tot be birthed right here in the crooked old house. The first time she brought this up, I laughed in a Hahaha! Good one! sort of way, and then, seeing her gaze harden ever so slightly, I said, well, yes, sure we could discuss that, sure! Hahaha! This time the Hahaha was a little higher pitched.

CHAPTER 1

This morning while splitting