On the Farm (2026)

As a kid, I would break into and scavenge the Hebiors' farm. Not during growing season; usually during the fall, when things were freshly tilled and bald.

Dense trees and coyote shrieks surrounded the farmland. Shotgun blasts snarled across the flat terrain. You had to go when the sun shone high and the grass glowed.

The Hebiors' horses would turn their ears from the homestead and switch their tails with intolerance. I'm pretty sure John was always watching from his window. He was our family friend.

I'd fill my basketball shorts' pockets with fossils and arrowheads. When they started spilling out, I'd stick them in the ankles of my New Balance 608s.

At our house on a hill, my Irish twin Libby and I would name and catalogue each and put them to rest in our Caboodle. Top shelf was for polished stones. Bottom was a thick geological and anthropological mess.

We kept our Caboodle between a state quarter collection and a binder full of holographic Pokémon cards tossed off our friends on the playground. These were on a hidden bottom shelf deep within our closet behind a compressed-plywood OSB. The Vault.

During our summers off, we would ride our bikes to the coast of Lake Michigan. The fossils there were almost as good, especially if you went out by the beach at the old Al Capone house. Lore said the oldest Bohrstein kid found a human skeleton there.

The Bohrstein boys, one in my class and one in Libby's, were jack full of it.

In addition to collecting rocks and fossils, Libby and I collected animals.

This is less sick than it sounds, though it is sick that I must assure you.

My parents felt guilty after they spirited away Lucy, the clinically possessed ex-track greyhound who slipped through cracks in sidewalks and was on our property for about 60% of her tenure, 0% by choice. God rest her soul, or energize it fully: whatever that dog preferreth.

Our first condolence was a fire belly newt on my sixth birthday. He was christened Newt Gingrich. For my sister in November, a pair of African dwarf frogs joined Gingrich. Mario and Luigi. Peach the male Betta weaved begrudgingly through their lives.

In the following years fully baptized into our reptamphibian cult were also Spike the leopard gecko, Stormy the salamander Libby caught, an anonymous twining chorus of gartersnakes and brownsnakes and redbellies heathenly snatched up and tied into a laundry bag in the forest, Zsazsa the bearded dragon, a series of painted turtles so foul they quickly returned to the ponds from which they emerged, and other species which invariably in their hordes shut a wing of our house off so that Grandma Betty wouldn't have a heart attack.

It was an entire discipline. Our cultivation knew no bounds. I believe there are still crickets metamorphosing in the eaves of that house. We ravaged stacks of books on our pets' care and longevity.

This was in the years before we graduated from cold blood to warm.

After noshing on their cousins at Pieces of Eight, Libby and I came home to a Hamletian tragedy befallen the entire Mario family and an esteemed member of the Republican party.

As it was with Lincoln's son Willie, assuredly there was something rotten in the water.

Libby and I took our oyster shells and dug each of them a grave at our secret hiding spot between the dense pines in our backyard. A painted shell headstone for each grave. We cried to sleep holding each other on the top bunk.

It was the beginning of a short hiatus. Then our family's heart began to ache.

We named the rescue mutt Indiana. That was back in 1999, the year I insisted on being called Dr. Jones. Indy was my fat red shadow. Once I played dead on the frozen lake and she sat on my head for half an hour.

Libby's shadow, Lucky, found us up north three years later. We thought he was a wolf cub, but he was a half-alive shepherd mutt with ticks and fleas renting at full vacancy. He lived off beached fish on the rez during his first year; he lived through a fall from a third-floor landing up in the Ozarks during his last.

The day after I graduated with my BA, Marge the blue heeler puppy waddled up to me from inside a round of chicken wire on an Amish farm. She was by far the runt of her litter. She grunted at me three times to pick her up from the other side of the wire. She cost $50. It was what I had in my pocket. She was the smartest dog who ever lived and my closest friend.

In the vault buried inside our closet, Libby and I keep a small musical jewelry box. Inside, two copyrighted Disney characters tremble and quake on a magic carpet atop a gyrating spring flung into permanent vibration. Spin the knob on the bottom of the box, and a theme song about traveling the world is tuned to hyperspeed. We tightened the screw three decades ago between fits of laughter.

Beneath the quivering duo is splayed an assortment of dog tags: the sort belonging to animals. After our dogs started passing away, we didn't know how to remember them properly. The pines in the backyard had been cut down, and we never got our pets' ashes anyway.

Sometimes with Libby and her two kids, I go to the Milwaukee Public Museum. The mammoth from the Hebiors' farm is there now. It carries a lot of our memory.

We go home to Libby's 500 square feet, with their dog Buns and their five guinea pigs, and their thriving vegetable garden and sprawling English garden, and it feels like someone lives there.