The Field He Watches From His Sink

The Girl With the Question

I have led the county 4-H forestry club for nine years now. It is not a big glamorous project.

The livestock kids get the ribbons and the crowds at the fair.

We tag trees and learn to run an increment borer and plant a few seedlings behind the extension office every spring.

Most kids join for the steers and the hogs and wander into forestry on the side.

The Thursday after the fire I almost canceled the meeting.

I did not have it in me to stand up and talk about leaf margins.

But forty kids were coming and their folks had already dropped them at the church basement.

So I stood up front and tried to get through a lesson on identifying hardwoods by their bark, and I could not keep my mind on a single word of it, and the kids could tell.

One of the older girls, a quiet one named Hannah who lives three farms over, raised her hand partway through and said, “Mrs. Frances, is it true your grandpa’s pine burned up?”

I said that it was.

She said, “The whole thing? All of it?”

And I said yes, the whole thing, and my voice did something right there in front of the children that it had never done before, and I had to turn around and pretend to write on the board.

When I turned back around Hannah was still looking at me, and she said, “Could we plant it again? Could that be the forestry project this year?”

I started to tell her all the reasons it could not be. Ten acres is not a school project.

Ten acres is a forestry operation, thousands of seedlings, hundreds of hours, and I am one woman with a club of children.

But the rest of the kids had already caught it, the way children catch a thing all at once, and they were sitting up straight, and a boy in the back row said, “How many trees even fit in ten acres?”

He said it like it was the best math problem anybody had ever handed him, and a couple of the others started guessing numbers out loud, and something in that cold church basement turned warm.

So I told them I would find out.

I went home that night and ran the numbers at the kitchen table, and those numbers were the first thing in two weeks that made me feel like myself again.