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By Root 367 0

note so pure it triggers my tinnitus—the ear nearest her mouth damps down and rings long after she is snoozing. For a while I did my best to ease her gently to sleep in a rocking chair just the way they do it in fabric softener ads, but the screeching went unabated. Then one desperate evening I sat on a giant rubber yoga ball Anneliese keeps in the bedroom and started bouncing. The baby’s cries softened. I bounced higher. The cries got softer. One does not wish to do harm, so I held her tight and close, steadying her neck and head in my palm, and went full-bore pogo-butt. I’m talking lift and clearance. Nothing gentle about it. And in five minutes, she was asleep. Now we bounce every night. Our bedroom window overlooks the garden, and for the rest of my life when I think of our first year on the farm I will remember my baby clamped to my chest and my beautiful beloved wife grubbing in the garden at twilight, working diligently to feed us over the seasons to come, my vision of her springing in and out of frame with every bounce.

Soporific bouncing is not just for babies. I am looking at a photograph Anneliese took three nights ago. My feet are on the floor and my butt is still on the ball, but I have tipped over backwards on the bed. I am sound asleep and so is Jane, curled like a little possum on my chest, my hand still across her back as it was when I drifted off feeling her breath rise and fall.

The pigs have eaten the bag of feed I got from the farmer, so today Amy and I make a run to the feed mill in Fall Creek. There is much that is similar to the New Auburn feed mill Dad patronized when I was a kid—the loading dock, the attached office, the dusty hand truck, and feed pallets all about—but the operation is much bigger than the one of my childhood, with towering bins and a radiating tangle of augers. Dad used to shovel our corn and oats into a howling subterranean grinder at the front of the mill, and then a few minutes later a man named Big Ed brought it back out the door in heavy bags that we wrassled into the truck bed. Today when the man wheels out our pig feed it is pre-bagged in paper sacks laced shut with pull strips, but when I stand at the edge of the dock and sling them in the truck bed, the soft heavy shape of the feed in my arms triggers a comfortable muscle memory. Inside the office the man rings us up on a computer rather than a notepad, but I am pleased to see a pair of farmers lingering and telling lies, just like in the mill of my childhood.

The New Auburn feed mill is long gone. It changed hands several times, the farmers disappeared, and I was a member of the fire department when we burned it to the ground for practice. As we pull away from the Fall Creek mill, I tell Amy how after the New Auburn mill closed Dad used to go to the Chetek mill, where instead of shoveling the feed from the pickup he backed up until his front tires clunked into a bracket and then the man inside hit a switch and a winch lifted the whole front of the pickup into the air, tipping it higher and higher until all the corn and oats just slid right out. I can’t imagine such a thing is allowed now, but back then we kids were allowed to ride in the cab as it rose in the air. Amy’s eyes are wide. “Oh! Can we go to that feed mill?”

On the way home we stop at the post office to mail a package to a friend serving a tour in Iraq. Amy drew him a picture and a note about the pigs. She asks, and so I try to explain war. As we drive through the tunnel of trees shrouding the last hill before our house she says we sure are lucky to live here. She doesn’t know it, but that boy in Iraq just lost some friends one Humvee ahead of him. I say, Yes, baby, we sure are.

A week now with the pigs, and so far so good. I’m still eager to get the chickens, but for now the pigs are a terrific diversion. It’s fun to take the slop buckets down and watch as they devour every single table scrap and leftover and rind and trimming and old potato we cannot use. The rubber pan I bought is proving to be pretty much useless, as they wade right into their