He’s still a wee foggy, having only two days ago come detached from his motorcycle at a fair rate of speed, necessitating a night in the hospital with the fat, clucking nurse shining a flashlight into his eyes at two-hour intervals. Pleasant.

But then, he couldn’t remember the name of his second-born, nor could he come up with the proper word for the wide sail of fabric they’d gently tucked around his shredded skin (blanket! Yes! That’s it!). So he supposes he got pretty much what he deserved.    

For most of his 37 years, he has played, if not consistently, then at least occasionally, in the margins. And by and large he has not complained when the bills have come due: broken ribs, cracked collarbones, the stick-punctured eyelid. Damn if that one didn’t hurt. But now this concussion, a whole new, strange realm of injury, with a whole new sobering set of ramifications. There is a particular, sick humor to be found in certain injuries. But not in maladies of the head. They just ain’t funny.    

He suspects its time to back off. Sell the motorcycle or at least stop trying to make it do third-gear wheelies. His responsibilities have become too great. Not just to the family, but to everything he sees when he raises his still-blurred vision from the computer screen: The lush spring grass. The cows and pigs, ever-bent to the task of eating. The chickens. The woodpile, half-stacked for the cold months that will be here soon enough, and no less cold for this delay. The gardens, still clean from the first spring weeding.   

He has lived his years in the absence of that sense of responsibility. He has always done what needs to be done not because he feels it his duty, but because he wants it done. And desires the strange, sometimes illogical recompenses: the tightness across his shoulders after a day of splitting wood; the bone-weariness after an afternoon of slaughtering pigs; the row of fresh-struck fence posts emerging from the earth like the very proof of his existence.    

But here he is, in the dusk of his fourth decade, wondering if he’s only had it half right all along, if it’s not all quite as simple and inconsequential as he’d like to believe. If the times might demand something more of him.  If his family and his little farm might need something more of him. And if he, in fact, owes this thing.   

He suspects it’s true, and he senses that this recognition, while arguably rather late in coming, holds the promise of even greater rewards. Of a depth of connection he never even knew was lacking. And he realizes, with no small relief, just how comforting he finds this.

‘The Greenneck’ lives and writes in the rusted-out shell of a one-ton Chevy pickup somewhere in Cabot, Vermont.