The woodshed was a scanty lean-to at the edge of the property and was ink-blue in the dusk when the youngest of the family walked across the yard with his hands in his pockets and sat on the old chopping block all crisscrossed with axe marks. He was seventeen and due to go to college the next morning, but he didn’t want to go all of a sudden and made no big secret out of it at dinner. Where he sat, the sun mulled like a brazen quarter just above the trees and the cicadas chattered in the woods past the pasture. He plucked the axe from the stump and held it in his farmer-bred hands.
If he stayed another two months he might learn to love the work that made him who he was. But he must go off and learn and become his own man and start a new life for himself in some other part of the country and return to this little scratch of woods for summers and holidays. He sat on the block and let the axe rest against his knee. The chopped wood from last year still stacked all the way to the roof of the woodshed behind him like a mountain of dominoes that one can’t be too careful about upsetting. And yet everything here was solid and eternal and almost holy. He picked up the axe again and closed his eyes so the deep hues of amber sunshine made him see constellations in his eyelids. When he opened them up his father walked down the slight hill to the barbed wire fence with hay on his shoulders. When he came back up he would see his son and talk with him. And maybe this was enough.
I feel like every other thing I read from you is about a young man from the hinterlands going off to college.