The Dance I Threw in the Shed

I pushed the workbench to the back wall and threw an old quilt of my grandmother’s over it. Then I swept that concrete until my shoulders burned.

I did it again with a hose and a squeegee and the heater running to dry it.

The oil spots would not come up. I got down with a wire brush and a can of orange cleaner and worked them anyway, on my knees, under the lights.

My father poured that floor with my grandfather in 1979. I was not born yet. But I know the story, because it is scratched into the wet corner by the door where a man wrote the date with a nail before the concrete set.

Oct 1979. Two sets of initials. My grandfather’s and my dad’s.

I ran my thumb over those letters a long time that first night. Then I got up and kept scrubbing, because a clean floor was the only thing I had to offer and I was going to offer it right.

My wife, Kim, came out Thursday night with a thermos. She found me on my knees scrubbing an oil spot in the glare of the work lights.

She did not say one word about me being foolish. She got the other brush out of the mud room and got down next to me.

“You know this might not work,” she said. “People already paid him. They might just go to the barn.”

“They might,” I said.

“And you’ll have strung all these lights for nobody.”

“Then I’ll have a real clean shed,” I said. She laughed, and we scrubbed.

Lights And A Fiddler

The lights I bought at the farm store in town. Every strand of warm white they had on the shelf, which came to a hundred and ten dollars.

I ran them up the posts and across the trusses until the ugly shed looked like something at the edge of a dream.

The pies and the cider were Kim’s department and the church’s. She made four calls Thursday night.

By Friday noon there were going to be more pies in my shed than a reasonable county could eat. A neighbor named Jeff was bringing a hundred-cup coffee urn and two coolers of cider he pressed himself.

The hard part was the music. You cannot have a dance with a radio.

You need a fiddle. A real one, with a bow arm that knows the old tunes. In our part of the country that meant Hap.

Hap is eighty-one years old. He has played every wedding and dance and funeral in three townships since Eisenhower.

He had played my grandfather’s dance for forty years. He had also, I knew, already told Barry he would play this year, because Barry had money and I had not yet asked.