I didn’t know which request Caleb was addressing, and perhaps he didn’t either, when he said confusedly, “Right now?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “Right now.”
I stood with a cranky Clementine and a wailing Samuel in front of the barn while Caleb took a series of horrible pictures. Each time he handed me the phone, I looked at the photo with shocked dismay. “Forget it,” I snapped finally. “Just—forget it. I’ll do it myself. Take the baby.”
I stood there in the driveway and snapped three hundred selfies of myself, my baby screaming, my husband and daughter standing nervously in the background like hostages waiting to be shot. “What are you doing, Mama?” Clementine said, over and over again. “What are you doing?”
Finally I roared QUIET.
Even Samuel was startled into silence. Then it was just the sound of the wind and the creaking trees and an eagle crying in the distance while I pressed the soundless capture button, again and again and again.
Eventually Clementine and Caleb started walking away. The baby was getting cold, he said. That was when I finally got the money shot: a close-up of my face, my cheeks berry-pink, smiling at the lens while my family walked away from me toward the barn. I looked—yes,startled by my own life; like I might burst into laughter at the sight of so many blessings behind me, the children and the husband and the big red barn. I looked like another woman entirely, my family like another family, this farm like another farm.
I wrote a caption—sometimes I can’t believe this is my ACTUAL,HONEST-TO-GODLIFE!—and then I pressed post.
It was the most important day of my life. The day I stopped working on my husband, my farm, my family, and returned to work on an old, beloved project: myself.
I walked back inside to make dinner for my family.
After dinner, I knocked myself up again.
31
Today Maeve and Ispent all day long sewing little hats for the chickens,our ladies.It’s the most fun I’ve had in who knows how long. Truly a very good day.
The morning started simply enough: Maeve, posing a question to my back while I picked out my outfit for the day. “Do you think the ladies get cold in the winter, Mama?”
Ever since the first snowfall, she’s been asking this question. She noticed how the cow and the horse are protected in their stalls at night, insulated by hay, and then she asked why the chickens don’t sleep inside their coop. I told her quite plainly that the chickens are stupid, theyshouldbe keeping warm inside the coop, and if they die, they have no one to blame but themselves. But still, she kept asking and worrying and fretting over their comfort, and so finally I said, “Why don’t we askthemwhat they want?”
And so we trudged through the snow to the chicken coop and asked the little brainless animals whattheythought. Maeve, an adept translator of chicken-speak, confirmed soberly to me that the ladieswerea bit chilly in the cold weather.
“Well,” I said, just as seriously. “It looks like we have a mission to accomplish.”
Half an hour later, at breakfast, Mary said she would be gone for a few hours collecting saffron in the woods, and I told her about our very important plans for the chickens.
“You’ll do this after your chores are done, right?” She looked sternly between the two of us. “Don’t take forever on this, anddon’tbe wasteful.”
And so Maeve and I stood on the porch, her little hand held tightly in mine, while we watched Mary walk down the road and disappear around the bend, leaving behind a clean trail of footsteps in the snow. For a moment my throat felt painfully tight.Why does she get to walk away from the ranch so easily?And then I remembered the Lord, and the divine right of His planning, and I bowed my head in apology.
I squeezed Maeve’s hand, raised my eyebrows. “What do you say we front-load the fun today, Maevie?”
Coats proved too difficult. The birds hated when Maeve tried to extend their wings to measure for the armholes, so hats it was, and now we are here, sitting at the kitchen table in the late afternoon, putting the finishing touches on these winter caps, which look like a drab combination of a fedora and a beret, when Mary walks back in through the front door, kicking snow off her boots, and says, “Oh,pleasetell me you haven’t been working on those all day.”
“Okay!” I say. “We haven’t been working on these all day.” I wink at Maeve, and she laughs and laughs.
Mary sighs, seems on the verge of saying something sharp, and then: nothing.
“Almost done with this one, Mama,” Maeve says cheerily. She holds up a mess of destroyed fabric.
I glance over my shoulder at Mary, who is standing strangely by the counter. Staring out the kitchen window at nothing. How long has she been gone? Much longer than a few hours. The whole day, practically. “Have you been collecting saffron this whole time, Mary?”
For a moment, it sounds like she doesn’t hear me. She just keepsstaring out the window, like she’s in a trance. “I found mushrooms, too,” she says finally. She turns for her bag, then pauses, noticing something by her foot. A scrap of fabric. She picks it up. “Is this one of your sweaters, Maeve?”
“It’s one of mine,” I say quickly. “One I never wear.”
“Sheneverwears it!” Maeve echoes. “Really, Mary, we swear!”
Mary nods slowly, then tucks the scrap in with the folded pile of clean rags in the kitchen corner. I know what she wants to say—This is wasteful, how careless of you to cut it up into scraps for a farmanimal—which is why it’s so strange when she says to Maeve, “It’s okay, little chicken. I’ll get dinner ready, and you can finish your work on these hats. Very important.”
