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By Root 314 0

I wrassle it back and forth until the patch is fluffed and soft and ready for seeds. Anneliese has been reading up on reduced tillage, mulching, and cover crops, and we intend to move that way, but for now the plowboy in me is soothed by the pillowy look of the churned earth. I step back for a moment to take it in and am heartened by the solid set of the posts and the taut lines of the well-stapled wire. I am forever cobbling things together—it feels nice to look at a job and think it might last. Amy has stripped down to her underpants, lain flat out in the fresh-tilled soil, and is sweeping handfuls of dirt over her legs and tummy. I start to tell her no, then walk away and leave her to it, one of the better decisions I’ve made all day.

I store the rototiller and walk into the house, dirty, sweaty, thirsty, hungry, and surprised to find several hours have passed. Upstairs I can hear Anneliese pacing and Jane crying. I wash up and take the baby. Laying her belly-down along the length of my forearm, I grip her torso with my hand. We call this the football hold, and it is the one thing I seem to be able to do well, babywise. Her arms and legs dangle awkwardly, but she nearly always settles and quietens, and does so now. Perhaps it is simple syncope. Soon she is asleep.

My mother-in-law and sister-and-law are in the kitchen making venison stir-fry. When it’s ready we eat on the deck overlooking the valley. Jane is awake again and happily gurgling. We’re letting her air her little hinder out, and she celebrates her diaperless freedom by peeing on the tablecloth. A minor diversion compared to this morning, when I was washing her on the changing table and with neither wink nor warning she ejected a rope of poop that arced into the wall six feet away. A true hydraulic marvel.

After the hot, sticky afternoon, storms have begun working either side of the valley and pushing a cool breeze before them. It’s nice, all of us out here together, eating and talking, laughing with the baby. I get going on the pigpen, or the garden fence, and from some imaginary omniscient perch I look down and see a man toiling on behalf of his family, forgetting that sometimes what the family needs is a man sitting still.

In the summer of 1989 I lodged with Tim’s parents for a stretch. I was trying to become a writer at the time, and began every morning in the front room, drinking tea beside a glowing coal grate and clacking away on a manual typewriter lent me by Tim’s mom. Tim had only recently moved out, and his turntable and a collection of vinyl albums remained on a low shelf beneath the windows that opened out to the street and front garden. Slice by vinyl slice, I worked my way through the music. Last night while writing under deadline, serving the clock more than the muse, I procrastinated by going online to track down a copy of Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood, an album I hadn’t heard since those mornings on Longford Road. The tears came at the chorus of “Lavender” (“Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, lavender’s green…”), but they were tinctured with gratitude that a song might so wholly transport me back to my friend.

And so this morning I spent an hour in the pole barn digging through the boxes where my music CDs have been stored since the move. Box by box I flip through the jewel cases, scanning the spines and pulling anything that evokes our long-gone days: the Waterboys, from my first visit in 1984. Simple Minds, for whom the Waterboys were opening the drizzly day we saw them in Milton Keynes Bowl. Avalon, by Roxy Music. Pink Floyd’s Animals and The Final Cut (Tim put me onto these after finding me listening to Dark Side of the Moon for the sixth day in a row). Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Cure (thirty seconds into “Plainsong” and I am alone in the Longford Road front room at 3:00 a.m., staring out the window at yellow lamplight reflected on wet tarmac, the rain gone to mist). I pull a Bronski Beat album so I can revive the wash of summer traffic and the scent of daffodils weaving through the second-story window of my British bedroom, matched