The Driveway We Built Around Her Rocks

Saturday

Saturday morning was clear again, and cold enough to see your breath until about nine. The last four trucks came at seven, eight, nine and ten.

The young driver from Friday came back for two of them and waved at me like we were old friends.

I spread every load. Emmett followed with the box blade. Around nine-thirty Ike came back over with his plate compactor in the back of his truck, and he and Emmett took turns running it down the length of the drive.

That is the morning in the picture people later saw, the one Ike’s grandson took from the fence line with his phone.

It is me in the skid steer, short auburn hair, navy coveralls and orange gloves, the new drive curving behind me along the wire fence.

Way back behind me in that picture you can see the riprap still sitting across the old drive, and the steel shop with its roll-up door, and the yellow birches. I look tired. I look happy. I suppose I was both.

The drive does curve a little. The fence line bends where Emmett’s grandfather went around a big boulder in 1951, and we bent the drive right along with it.

It is not a straight shot, and I am glad. It looks like it belongs there.

By Saturday noon it was done. Three hundred feet of fresh Class 5, packed and crowned so the water would run off both sides, from the hayfield gate all the way to the shop yard and our garage.

Emmett climbed off the tractor and walked the whole length of it, from one end to the other.

He stomped on it every few feet, the way a man stomps on lake ice in December before he trusts it.

When he got back to me he pulled off his glove and took my hand, my orange glove still on, and squeezed it.

He did not say anything. His eyes were wet. I had never seen him cry, not even at his mother’s funeral.

Then he went in the shop, and I did not see him for two hours. I heard the plasma table running. I did not ask what he was doing.

Ike loaded up his skid steer. I tried to give him two hundred dollars for the fuel and his time. He would not take it.

He said, “You can plow my lane once this winter when I’m down in Arizona at my sister’s.” I said that was a deal.

The rocks sat right where Lorene had dumped them. We did not move a single one.

We did not spray paint them or put up a sign or do anything at all to them. We just left them there across the old drive.

Sunday

We went to church Sunday morning, the little white Lutheran church on the county road where Emmett was baptized.

Lorene goes to the eleven o’clock. We went to the nine. I did not plan that, but I did not complain either.

They sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” for the closing hymn, and I stood there in the pew with my arms still sore from the skid steer and sang it louder than I usually do.

After church, Emmett and I moved our mailbox. We dug the post out of the turnout by the old drive and set it on a new post beside the hayfield gate, and we called the post office to tell them about the move.

That left Lorene’s mailbox standing alone in the turnout, right next to the riprap.