The Natural Laws of Good Luck by Ellen Graf

speed toward the distant ocean. He was a rakish novice, not as expert as a Baltimore oriole suspending a nest of grass from a forked branch or a beaver slapping mud on sticks, but still worthy of nature’s tribe, where ingenuity is the highest value. We managed to get both halves of the garage raised up, one at time, and secured to the sculpture-in-motion that the garage had become.
    My friend’s husband Mike, a professional carpenter, stopped over to check on our progress. I heard him mutter to himself “Sweet Jesus.” He took me aside and said soberly, “You know, when you put the roof on that contraption, the whole thing is going to take off like a giant kite. And the weight of the snow is going to bea problem now that you’ve widened the arc out.” But by this time I was beginning to think, “Maybe OK.” I thanked him politely for his warning. The structure stiffened up considerably when we nailed old sheet metal roofing to make walls, and even more when we tightened the laces binding the vinyl over the curved roof poles. By the time my husband had mixed eighty bags of cement one by one with sand and water, encasing the entire bottom edge of the three walls in concrete, we were ready for a hurricane.
    As a finishing touch, Zhong-hua installed a motion-sensor light he had purchased at a garage sale. He fed the wires through a crack in the foundation of the house. I held a flashlight while he expertly spliced the wires into the main line outside the fuse box. After that, the light went on every time a deer passed within fifty feet, a skunk ambled by, or Socrates wandered into the garage to check out the garbage.
    I had been queasy when our perfectly good one-car shelter was reduced to a scrap pile of wood, metal, and fiber, and I was elated when all this resurrected, as promised, into a two-car garage. We didn’t have two cars. We had a seventeen-year-old Nissan truck with a mystery muffler. When I drove down the road and unrolled the window, the glass slid down inside the door, never to emerge again. Winter arrived, and the old truck was cold. Then the toilet backed up. The bathtub wouldn’t drain. I asked my neighbor where the septic tank was because he had been born in our bedroom seventy years ago. “Oh, there isn’t one,” he said. “Me and Pa just used to get in that hole back there once a year and shovel the stuff out.”
    Snow drifted down. We dug a chest-deep trench and started looking for the six-inch iron pipe that, legend had it, ran underground from the house. Tree roots and boulders thwarted our pick and shovel; I lowered myself down into the muck, grunting and panting to loosen the stones. They made a huge sucking sound on the way out. I heaved one onto the bank, emitting an inhuman sound from my abdomen. “Good,” my husband said.
    I felt my strength giving out as my mind took in the enormity of the task. He thought I was much stronger than I really was. My knuckles were raw, and my nose was running. Strands of hair blew across my face and stuck there. Sewer sludge piled up in mounds and hardened in the cold, like chocolate cupcakes sprinkled with snow. I wanted to pronounce our efforts futile, sordid, impossible, but my husband never entertained these kinds of self-hexing thoughts. He just kept going and said, “No problem,” “Just try,” and “Maybe OK.” After a few days, we found the end of the iron pipe about six feet down and began ramming the impacted sludge with an iron rod. “One, two, three, ugh!
Yi, er, san
, ugh!” There was a magical moment when we heard a faint rumble. The water gushed through into the trench, and I cheered in joyous relief.
    It was still snowing when my husband returned with the Nissan truck. Loaded with bricks, the truck bed swayed alarmingly from side to side as he bounced into the yard over the frozen bumps. He had found a demolition site by the side of the road in the