Laundry fresh from the clothesline smells like October. Flapping in the April sunshine, shirts and sheets pick up the same coppery tang that clings to your hair as you step inside from a chilly autumn evening. I press my nose into a white pillowcase and catch a second scent, a brisk, cool sweetness, like raindrops on stone.
* * *
A week after I arrive at my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse, the aging furnace quits. It’s January in Michigan, and there’s snow on the way. Eric and Mary debate making yet another service call. Then Eric tosses another log in the woodstove, I pull out the shawl I’m crocheting, and we forget about the furnace entirely.
* * *
I sit in the darkened kitchen beside a plastic dog carrier. Reaching through the grated door, I run a fingertip along the tiny white foreleg of a tiny white lamb curled on the straw inside. He slid into the world less than a week ago beside his glossy black sister. She spent her days figuring out how to scamper and gambol and do things that lambs do in the springtime. He spent his days wobbling and weakening. Now, he can’t even stand to suckle from his mother’s swollen udder.
Mary sits in the living room, googling his symptoms. A bottle and rubber nipple are drying beside the kitchen sink. The next morning, she buries him beneath the herb garden. A broken hip, the vet says. It turned septic and poisoned his tiny white body.
In May, I pull up mint plants around the black plastic tub that marks his grave. His sister bleats in the pasture up the hill. I wonder if she feel his absence.
* * *
Thunder murmurs as I creak across my bedroom. Downstairs, a panicked pitbull has rattled free from his crate and is attempting to chew through the low wooden gate separating him from the rest of the house. I unlatch the gate and see smears of his blood on the wooden slats. Zeb presses his lean body against my legs, tail thumping apologetically. I sit beside his crate and he crumples into my lap. Only his head and shoulders fit, the rest spilling into a leggy white heap. I rub his neck until the shaking stops.
* * *
Inside the stuffy chicken coop, only one next box is occupied. The russet hen watches me sternly as I approach, a protective sleeve pulled over my hand. She gives my sleeve a perfunctory peck, then warbles as I reach beneath her belly and draw out two creamy white eggs. I sneak a quick stroke along the feathers of her gleaming auburn wing before she squabbles and leaps from the nest box to join her sisters in the sun.
* * *
I carefully rebalance a basket filled with white plastic hangers and quickly slam the car door before the basket can slide again. I forego a third trip upstairs. I’ve already re-opened the drawers and peered into every corner of the closet. Instead, I hug my aunt as she heads out into the garden. I hug my uncle, too, and stumble over unexpected tears as I thank him. “Of course,” he says, “That’s what family’s for.”
* * *
I perch on a stack of mattresses in the corner of my new Ann Arbor bedroom. Most of my possessions are strewn around my feet, waiting to be squirreled away in white dresser drawers and arranged on wooden shelves. I dreamed about Zeb last night. I dreamed that he flopped into my lap and knocked me over as I laughed and laughed.
Geneva Langeland (’13) survived graduate school with minimal blood loss, escaping with her ms in environmental policy and communication. She now works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the communications editor at Michigan Sea Grant. There, she gets to hang out with educators, researchers, and communicators who love the Great Lakes as much as she does.
