Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link Read Free Book Online Page B

books to see if subsequent readings bring any understanding. Are mountains really mountains or aren’t they? Are waters waters, or what? Thich Nhat Hanh says deep sadness comes from being attached to a flawed sense of coming and going. If I am doing either, I can’t put a finger on which one it is. I read the Book of Job a couple times through in awe. My faith is tiny. It could not withstand even one of those sadistic tests. I would fail. I feel like I have already failed.
    I watch my sons out the window pick the ripe carrots, snap peas, and sweet corn that I’ve ignored, eating them raw right out there in the garden, dirt and all. In another lifetime, such antics would send me for the camera. Now, I can’t get out of my chair.
    There are still a few warm days left before fall, and in the late afternoon when they get off the schoolbus, the boys set down their backpacks, take off their shirts and shoes, and run through the sprinkler in their shorts or jeans to cool off.
    We live only three miles from Grand Traverse Bay and one of the most beautiful freshwater beaches in the Midwest, but all my kids get is our low-pressure, well-water sprinkler. I don’t have the energy or the gas money for the beach. I don’t have the internal drive or focus for editing and writing work, either, and assignments are overdue.
    Through the screen door I hand the boys sandwiches wrappedin squares of wax paper and Baggies full of apple slices. I watch them swordfight with sticks and make thumb whistles out of the variegated blades they rip from the landscape grasses around the pond. I can hear them out there, making a weird sound as if they were all out of breath. I have to think about it before I realize what it is. Laughing.
    Blue jays are gorging themselves on the sunflower heads in the garden, tent-worm caterpillars make skeletons out of the elm tree, and late-season growth sprouts from the jack pines out by the road. These new pine branches grow in between the old ones and stick straight up, just like a middle finger. It feels like even the trees are flipping me off.
    And I learn that a lowland jungle of leaves and vines have taken over the pasture on a Saturday when I hear one of the boys crying.
    “Mom!” comes the sobbing holler from outside. It sounds like Will. And it sounds like he just said, “Luke squashed my head!”
    I think of Luke’s precision with the BB gun and have just enough concern to get myself outside.
    The holler is followed by a boy running toward the house, one hand pressed to the side of his blond head, the other still gripping his stick sword and pumping back and forth as he runs toward me on tireless boy legs. Dirty face, no shirt. Yes, it is Will—so aptly named—and even though he is crying, he isn’t sad at all, he is furious.
    I am outside for the first time in days and we meet on the porch. He drops the stick at my feet and drops himself into my arms, pouring out an injustice he’s been subjected to during a fight with the enemy. Also known as his brother.
    “No heads!” he spits out. “That’s the rule! Luke did it on purpose!”
    I feel a lump starting to form on the side of his head when I peel away his sweaty hand. I look down at his weapon and see the end of it has been expertly sharpened. Probably with a jackknife—all the boys have one of their own, given to them by my brother, Ben, from his camping, hunting, and fishing stash. Someone has wrapped the handle of Will’s stick in duct tape for a better grip. I touch the business end with the tip of my finger; it is so sharp, it could spear fish.
    “What’s this for?” I ask him, holding it up so the point is at eye level.
    “For throwing,” he answers, looking me in the eye and crossing his arms tightly over his bare chest. “And jabbing.”
    I’ve failed my sons. Again. For proof of this, just look at what they’ve been up to while I’m not paying attention. Owen, who has been such a help these past few weeks, isn’t here right