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I dither over whether to call the farmer back to see if the dog’s shots are up-to-date. I don’t want to bother him or get him worked up. It seemed pretty clear to me that the dog had been whipped up by all the excitement. People who excuse biting dogs rank high in my pet peeve list, but I truly believe this incident was an aberration. Then again, there are specific drawbacks to rabies—or hydrophoby, as the cowboys in Louis L’Amour books called it. On the other hand, my puncture wounds are relatively superficial. In the end, I just tell Anneliese to pack me off to Urgent Care if I start walking into walls or slobbering. For legal purposes I should say that if you find yourself in similar circumstance, I cannot recommend that you follow my health-care decision-making tree. At dusk I check the pigs one last time. They are lying tight against each other, settled in for the night. I go back in the house and climb the stairs, kiss Amy good night, pause at the crib and listen to Jane breathe, and then crawl in beside my beloved Anneliese. As I pull the covers up and roll gingerly over to sleep on my unbitten side, I think, Yessir—we’re in the pig business.

Jane has enough muscle tone now that I can prop her up in the old green chair across from my desk and write while she grins at me. It’s pretty handy really—she can’t crawl, so she’s pretty much stuck wherever I stick her. She grins and slumps, and every now and then I give her a boost. I can usually get ten or twenty minutes in before her face clouds. Then I have a series of stair-stepped actions I implement to postpone the ultimate inevitable monsoon. First I turn the stereo on, normal volume. This captivates her for another five to ten minutes. Then when her brow begins to furrow, I crank the volume. She seems particularly soothed by Steve Earle’s thumping version of “Six Days on the Road,” which buys me three minutes and eight seconds of additional productivity. Finally, as a last resort, I pull out the guitar and sing some of my own stuff. I sit on the footstool so we are face-to-face. Jane grins and coos for about two minutes, at which point she finds my oeuvre derivative, and her lip begins to square off.

There is this stage—right when she is transitioning from verklempt to full-out bawling—when her lower lip widens and rolls out, but instead of a rosy little pout, it locks into a position so straight-edged you could grab the kid by the feet and use the lip to strike off wet concrete. One day when she was going from happy to sad I shot the entire transition on a digital camera just so I could document the geometric rigidity of it. I realized halfway through that I was behaving on a par with the heartless producer who films the crying kid cast to demonstrate inferior products in a diaper commercial, but I kept snapping anyway.

The day after the pigs arrive, Amy harvests two of the radishes that survived the excavations of Fritz the Dog. She holds them up to either side of her ears, and I take a picture. She is beaming, her front teeth still missing. Then she runs off to rinse and eat them. I remember doing the same thing at her age, rinsing a spring radish under the brass standpipe beside the garden. I remember the cold water made my knuckles ache, I remember watching the dirt dissolve and flush from the root hairs to leave them feathery and white; I remember the red skin shining beneath the film of water. I always nibbled the bland taproot first. And then that first full bite through the scarlet skin, the crisp crunch, the excitement of springtime snack food fresh from the ground. Over by our standpipe, Amy’s lack of front teeth put her at a disadvantage, but she’s gnawing assiduously, the radish jammed way back in a corner of her mouth so she can get at it with her molars. Her lips are pulled off-center, but I’d say the crinkle in her nose substitutes for a smile.

Now that the pigs are in place, I am going to get serious about building that chicken coop. As is standard procedure