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By Root 422 0

a potpourri of alfalfa cubes, Terramycin crumbles, horse vitamins, and the malty sweet scent of milk replacer mix. When I pass the stacks of rough paper sacks containing calf starter, the smell of moist grain and molasses reminds me that we ate it by the handful when we were kids. Dad called it “calf candy,” and it wasn’t bad. Most of it was fortified with antibiotics, so we rarely got the scours. Over in the feeder section, where the galvanized grain scoops and hay racks are for sale, I pick up a heavy rubber pan for feeding slop. Then, with a rough idea in mind of how I might construct a watering system for the pigs, I also load the cart with an adjustable spring-loaded spigot, some tubing, and a bagful of pipe clamps and plastic reducers. As I head for the checkout I pass a rampart of salt blocks piled on pallets just the way Dad used to store them. Each cube is roughly the size of a car battery. We used to drape ourselves over the stack side by side and lick the blocks. The salt was coarse against our tongues, like licking fine-grain sandpaper. If we kept at it too long, our tongues got raw. Dad always got the reddish brown blocks with trace minerals—there were no goiters in this family. I’d give the blocks a lick now, but I don’t want to freak out the guy watching the security cameras.

Back home, I rig the waterer, using a plastic barrel I got from my friend Mills. I mount the waterer on a hastily arranged tripod, and the elevation is sufficient so that the water runs down the hose and out the spigot. I am not much of a talent toolwise, but this has gone well, so when I am done I stand back and give it the classic male postproject lookover and am satisfied. After two days shirtless in the freak March sun, I am deeply burned. This is medically foolish, but here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.

A week later, and it is a gray, mist-spitting day. The warm weather has continued, with a moderation from ridiculous to mildly unseasonable. Amy and I are stacking firewood. She is expected to pitch in as standard procedure, but this time it’s a bit of a shanghai, as she is being compelled to stay home and work while Anneliese runs errands in town. This is the promised consequence of a recent in-store meltdown. She is weepy at the get-go, but then as so often happens if one maintains one’s parental resolve and resists either cave-in or eruption, about twenty minutes in we are happily chatting, and by the time we stack a half-cord, she is flat-out jabbering. “I’m glad I didn’t go to town!” she exuberates at one point, and it briefly strikes me that this calls into question the very efficacy of the punishment, but I abandon this train of thought as unproductive. Sweating as I always do when I do anything more physical than lift a pen, I tell her about my friend Frank, whose father taught him that firewood warms you twice—once when you split and stack it, and once when you burn it. I predict by the time Amy is nine, “Firewood warms you twice” will make her list of Top Five Phrases Most Likely to Make Me Roll My Eyes at the Old Guy. Somewhere from the piney draw below us comes a pheasant’s sore-throated squawk. Of course we cannot know, but we wink at each other, assuming it’s Mister Big Shot in hot pursuit.

We work for two hours. Then we spend a little time picking up the usual bits of yard garbage revealed when the snow retreats. All the bare ground reminds me that I have promised Anneliese I will make a cold frame for the garden, so I wander around the sheds rustling up scrap lumber and an old storm window, a box of drywall screws, and two rusty hinges. In about twenty minutes I clatter together what could pass for the junior high shop project of a three-fingered monkey, but then I cut myself some slack and declare it evocative of a sculpture I once stumbled across in a stairwell at the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York City. Amy and I scratch up a patch of ground near the spot where Anneliese’s mother had last year’s garden, and then we plant lettuce, radishes, carrots, and some parsley. It’s a rush job, and we’ll