Truck by Michael Perry

made a batch of spaghetti. After the crisp air it is good to come in to the pasta steam. Mark and Kathleen’s house is built into a hillside, and from the dining room table we can see for miles across the simply and perfectly named Blue Hills of northern Wisconsin. We talk about the truck, but we also talk about our cousin Sukey, a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines. She sends us e-mails from somewhere in Africa. We remember her as a blond tyke at Fourth of July picnics. Her husband, Steve—also a helicopter pilot in the Marines—is facing deployment to Afghanistan. Mark and Kathleen are adjusting to their newborn boy. I call him Sidrock, which is not his given name, but such are the prerogatives of uncles. While the grown-ups talk about loved ones at war, Sidrock is goobering in his infant seat.
    Mark and I plan to start tearing down the International next weekend. The idea is to get it back up and running by November, in time for deer-hunting season. I have this desire to bring my deer—a year’s provision of meat—out of the woods in the back of the truck. On the way home,I am following John down a dip between two hills when he slows on the upside and gradually stops. Out of gas. John has already burned half a day helping me, but when he climbs down from the cab he is shaking his head and grinning. “I’ve got a couple cans back home,” he says. Rather than try to explain to me where to find them, he and Leroy take my car, and I sit on the flatbed facing backward, ready to warn off anyone who comes over the hill too fast. We used to follow this road to church when I was a child. Back then this truck was new, delivering shiny tractors to every corner of the county. Now the farms are gone and the only tractors selling are smallish vintage models, repainted so they’ll catch the eye of some out-of-towner when they pass by on the way to the lake property or hunting cabin. I place my palm on the worn wooden deck and it transmits a sweet ache. This is getting ridiculous. In the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a diagnosable mania. They’d be slipping Prozac in my porridge. The sun is warm but the wind is cold, and I’m glad when John returns and we can go home.
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    The snow will fall again before the frost is out, but we are gaining momentum for that time of year when everything reappears. The ugly stuff first, as it happens: neglected lawnmowers, weed-wrapped tires, waterlogged copies of the Early Bird Shopper . But most days there is a flavor to the air that suggests greenery will triumph.
    Last thing before I turn off the lights and head for bed, I inspect the sprouting tray. Each cell cradles a cube of peat, and at the center of each cube is a seed, quietly pursuing the sun. Thomas Moore said tears are a luxury only to the happy. When I am forced to cast my eyes beyond my own navel, I realize that a dip in sweet melancholy is every bit as indulgent as a bubble bath. Be joyful, says Wendell Berry, though you have considered all the facts.

C HAPTER 5
APRIL
    I HAVE A DATE. With a real woman.
    I have scheduled a haircut.
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    I was born with hair trouble. “Looks mostly like Daddy,” wrote Mom in my baby book. “Has his front cowlick.” In a photo taken at three and a half months, I am sitting naked in the bathroom sink, my eyes are wide and my eyebrows are raised. I look like a startled little Buddha. The expression amplifies the cowlick, which flares in a backward arc over the right-hand side of my brow. In my second-grade school picture, I am sporting a buzz cut. The cowlick bristles like a crockery brush. In third grade, I grew out my bangs, and the cowlick popped through like crabgrass. I fought that thing six ways to Sunday. Plastered it flat, slept in a cap, hair-sprayed it, combed it silly. Nothing worked. I pestered my mother to the point that she took to strapping it down at bedtime with pink beauty tape—the kind Ladies of a