At Home on This Movable Earth

Abstract

Calf bucket. Full to the brim with fresh, frothy milk, it's what my grandfather permitted me to carry from the cream separator out of the porch and around the house and across the backyard to the barb-wire fence where under the lowest strand I would push it to feed the waiting calf. Calf bucket. It is also the rusty receptacle I found precisely where I had left it?near the lone stanchion in the barn near the alley, barn large enough to accommodate our one Jersey cow, barn with its weathered shingles and unpainted one-by eights well on its way to oblivion. We'll need another bucket to put the dirt in, my father had said. We already had one bucket, a discarded lard container Father had brought home from the cafe. But we needed another container so that as I trudged up the earthen steps to empty one, my father said, he could be filling the other. I could sense that something big, maybe even something gar gantuan, was about to unfold, but I didn't know exactly what that