If Only You Can Figure Out What It Is

Hungry

Our older boy is sick, so for the past nights I took his place at the barn where our sons do chores twice weekly. There I rolled the big round bale down the aisle with my younger boy, both of us leaning into it with all we had and a little more, the cows lapping the last pellets of grain off the floor, the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the west windows, dulled by decades of dust, everything caught in the ethereal suspension of day’s transition to evening. The smell of cow shit and fermented grasses, the sound the cows shuffling and chewing, and the banter – always the banter: So-and-so did so-and-so to so-and-so, if it’d only rain the grass would green right up, the big Swiss isn’t producing like she should, and wasn’t that one hell of a sugaring season. On it goes, one tale after another, some of them tall, some of them true, and some split right down the middle. Not necessarily true, but not altogether untrue, either, and you know that even that part that’s not true speaks a certain truth. If only you can figure out what it is.

Yeah. I like those ones. I think those are my favorite.