Nate Lowe

Shed

“First, they dug a round trench [...] lastly, every man taking a small piece of earth of the country from whence he came, they all threw in promiscuously together.”

—Romulus, by Plutarch
tr. John Dryden

In the backyard of his home in Bend, Oregon, my brother broke the ground with a shovel, two hands clutching the wooden shank, a foot heavy against the blade. Bent over, he traced a fourteen-by-twelve feet rectangular space by digging a perimeter trench, then worked his way back and across, eventually leaving the ten-inch-deep plot empty. Roughly eight weeks later a shiplap cedar storage shed would stand in the place of this dugout space, the deep roof overhangs and shingled peaks making it look somewhat cottage-like, but now the work of building was just beginning. Our work was beginning. Sandy soil pitched over dry grass. Tree roots lay cut and exposed to the climbing hot sun. Chad rose and wiped his brow with a sleeve and rested a foot atop the spade. A rust-pocked Toyota pickup drove through the back alley behind the yard, just beyond where he worked, and filled the still air with gravel dust. A blue Steller’s jay perched on an arm of elm above us heckled the handiwork. I stood back and waited, watching my brother from a distance, settling into this unspoken but binding language of work. Though we had not seen each other for nearly a year, divided by a couple thousand miles, we spoke little in our concentration. Chad scanned his excavation like a tomb digger, sighting clean-edged walls. His build suited the job: broad shoulders, deep chest, muscular legs. And Chad’s hands knew the work well, practicing what he had witnessed our father do on our Illinois farm a hundred times before by hand, by shovel, by machine. This callusing of palms. This turning of soil.

I followed behind Chad working a steel rake across the dug plot, my hands seven years less experienced, my mottled hair a deep brown and longer than his shaved blonde roots. Side by side, equally short and square in stature, our shoulders touched and moved succinctly in the work. Our bodies belied the distance that existed between our ages: he, 30—I, 23. I leveled the floor of the earthen cutout with sand we’d purchased from a local landscaping company. Chad stepped out of the plot and inspected for low spots and pitched spadefuls toward a divot. I raked them level. A rhythm, metered in muscle and the weight of fill sand, dictated our work. Dig, pitch, furrow. Dig, pitch, furrow. And so it continued until we were done, and Chad said, “That’s good.”

Early the next morning, just before another sated sun poured over the top of us and after I pulled the rake across the sand one last time, a cement truck maneuvered its chute from the alley into my brother’s backyard between the old elm and newly planted aspen saplings and filled the dug hole with our foundation. Concrete rolled down the chute dense and wet and piled up in the center of the plot like a ribbon of cake batter. Chad and I stepped into it wearing rubber boots and toting a shovel and a steel rake. From the center, he heaved shovelfuls toward the corners of the 2” x 4” forms that we had squared and staked around the plot the night before. I plunged the rake in and out of the batter, working out any air that might cause cracks or chipping in the future, forcing it into the corners until it came flush with the top of the 2” x 4”s. The more I mined the concrete the more it filled, the more it surfaced smooth. This process continued until the space became full and the diesel truck moved to another job and Chad and I were left standing with a four-inch thick batter to be skimmed smooth with a bull float and trowels. Two days later, when peeled away from the dried concrete, the forms would leave clean, even edges and ninety-degree corners.

We had known this work, separately, in our previous lives as boys living on a Midwest farm. Our hands and backs would always know it; we were and are our father’s sons. We knew, then, that money grew as ears of corn in our fields, which Dad harvested on cold, still nights in October. We knew that big projects always brought sturdy, laughing men and giant machinery that spat oil and hummed and lifted boys in their gaping loaders. We knew that every project started with the pouring of concrete. In those earlier days as apprentice builders we went shirtless, wore faded Lee jeans, and scurried after tools that would soon be laid to wet concrete: the groover, the bull float, the screed. They were what transformed the cement and gravel and water into a surface as smooth as marble. The men who helped my father were hired hands or friends or farmers, some he had known since a boy. They told jokes to keep time; their shoulders heaved as they howled. The next week would be another farm, another pad of concrete, another machine shed raised. Under humid summer suns we ate sandwiches on triangles of Wonder bread and tipped back heads and chugged from spouts of water jugs that edged over dropped tailgates, our bony elbows touching those we idolized, and after the last trowel had been cleaned with water and the concrete had been floated smooth to our father’s liking and the men shuffled off to their families, we knelt to the wet pad and, with a steady index finger, etched our names.

* * *

At the end of May 2001, my girlfriend (now wife) Carrie and I had packed my small pickup with enough things to sustain us for one summer in the high desert of Oregon and started the 1,800-mile drive to Chad’s small brick home in Bend. That month, I graduated from the University of Iowa with an English degree and had thoughts of going on to graduate school but relished the concept of time away from homework and deadlines in exchange for long days in the hot, dry air getting my hands dirty. Chad had decided, the previous winter, that instead of renting a storage unit for four years while he and his wife taught abroad in Africa and rented out their brick bungalow, he would build a small shed in his backyard to store their belongings.

“You and I can build one,” he had said over the phone months before, silent January snow flakes falling under streetlights in Iowa City. This was a typical Lowe response: do it yourself, without instructions. And after five years of reading and writing in college, no calluses to show for the work of thoughts, this idea found purchase and would not let go of me in the months of anticipation that followed. While I could not envision the shed that eventually would be built, the details of the process—the work—came clear. I longed to heft a hammer in my hand, shoulder an aluminum ladder, release my softened skin to sweat—to return to that boy on the farm.

Looking back, my brother had always been someone akin to “a visitor” to the farm during holidays. I was eleven when he left for college. Memories of him living at home have somehow been buried in me; they are merely static images devoid of dialogue: listening to his stereo in a basement bedroom, handing out wrenches and sockets and carburetors like an ER nurse as he repaired motorcycles in the musty-framed chicken coop long ago turned to storage shed, hauling bales together on a teetering hayrack, his high school silhouette stone dark when the sun rotated behind him as the kicking baler circled for another row. Essentially, I went to Oregon that summer to live those memories I had lost. To build something. A lofty romantic notion, I know now and probably sensed then, but as I moved through the world a recently ordained “college grad,” the corporeal instantly became emotional for me: the broad Montana mountains that quickened my heart, the snaking clear clear rivers that I could see to the bottom of, those red-barked Oregon Ponderosas that threw giant shadows across the highway bore me into a world of arcing possibility.

Carrie and I arrived on my brother’s doorstep after three days on the road. When we pulled up, the yard in front of the one-story brick house reminded us of an open-air bazaar displaying piles of cookware and Tupperware on folding tables, stacks of used CDs that had evidently lost their original charm, used and random outdoor gear, a pair of leather telemark boots, hundreds of spare mountain bike parts, and boxes of paperbacks. A handful of people meandered between the piles and tables, picking then putting things down as they went. Chad was gone, but his wife Sarah was sitting on the front stoop trying to get a respectable price from a customer for a set of her old college biology books. This would be the first purge of possessions of many to come that summer. Chad and Sarah were leaving in August for Egypt. Both teachers, they had signed a two-year contract with an international baccalaureate school in Cairo. Just as Carrie and I drove in to Bend, Chad and Sarah were making plans to leave. Always, it had felt like this: I would catch up to my brother just as he was moving on.

But this eventuality did not dampen the excitement Carrie and I enjoyed when we arrived. Both Illinois farm kids, we were living, for the first time, in a new country where the smells of sweet, earthy sage and spiced juniper filled each day. Carrie, an environmental science student at Iowa, had found a job working for the High Desert Museum, a natural history museum a few miles outside of Bend, as a student volunteer coordinator for the summer. And I had in mind only to scribble future plans and build the shed, visualizing this new landscape as a new start. This summer as a bridge to connect the expansive gap that separated me from my older brother. I brought with me a box of books and office supplies—pens, pads of paper, journals, notebooks I had used in college—clothes for all weather, a bag of CDs, my mountain bike and camping equipment, and a hefty cache of tools I dropped into the bed of my pickup just before leaving. An eclectic assortment of accoutrements, I realized, but I wanted to be ready for anything.

Sarah and Chad decorated a room in the basement for our extended stay. They had painted it clean white and hung one of my grandfather’s weathered Stetsons, a rusted pair of spurs, and a sun-bleached horse skull on one wall. Above the futon where we slept, they tacked an old Spanish movie poster showing Yule Brenner in a cowboy hat riding in to save the poor and terrorized farming villagers, Los Siete Magnificos in bright yellow words stretched across the top. Chad had built a string of shelves out of planks and concrete blocks for us to store clothes. I busied myself on the first night filling the basement room with my things, thinking to myself, “I am living with my brother.”

Two mornings later, Chad and I emerged from the kitchen onto the back patio of brick, gripping fresh mugs of coffee. Chad walked to the spot beyond the patio where he thought the shed should go, a legal pad tucked under his arm and a pencil above his ear—tools that would bring his imagination closer to a realization. He resembled a residential contractor if it weren’t for the open-toed Tevas, Gramicci shorts, and Patagonia fleece pullover.

“You look vaguely professional, Chad,” I said, mockingly. “What gives?”

His response was to flip the bill of his cap up, hike the waist of his shorts above his belly, and hunch his body over to accentuate a misplacedness—his most common theatric. But I still chuckled.

Their back yard is nearly 50 feet deep by 40 feet wide, and Chad was standing just inside the back fence he had built a year or so before, ten feet in from an alley that ran along the back of their yard. There was nothing in the yard at the moment, only a wide swath of wood chips that stopped at the fence. I asked myriad questions about what we were building: how deep, how wide, how tall? Chad took a sip of his coffee, then pointed to a somewhat large branch of the elm tree about fifteen feet from the ground and said, “That’ll have to go.”

“What about the back fence?” I asked, noticing how, at that moment, it cut a cross section through the imaginary shed.

Chad gave me the thumbs down sign and walked back to the patio. He took a seat next to me at their sun-bleached picnic table and plopped the legal pad down and began sketching. “It’ll be shiplap cedar siding . . . there’s a guy in Redmond,” he said in short bursts as he penciled in the elm to give the small building dimension. “And you know those architectural style black asphalt shingles? . . . We’ll add trim that matches the house . . . Do you think a two-foot or three-foot roof overhang?”

As my brother spoke and scribed beside me, the shed began to take shape on the page, and I first glimpsed the summer that awaited me.

* * *

There is a picture I come across often when I am visiting my parents in Illinois, where they still live on the farm where I grew up. I am a boy, maybe five or six-years-old—that stage of my life when my hair was neither blonde nor brown. The day is brilliant with sun and blue sky. I am shirtless and stand with hands on hips. My elbows make perfect triangles as I squint toward the camera. I am surrounded by my father, who is shirtless; his brother, Jake, a partner in the farm, shirtless; and their high school friend, Ray, a third partner, shirtless. Beyond us a whole crew of men has been captured in the act of reaching for a trowel to fill an empty pocket of the puttylike concrete or paying the ten-foot bull float out across the wet slab like a Gondola driver with his oar or cleaning dried concrete from wood forms with a garden hose and the toe of a boot. Farther is a field of corn burgeoning from black loam. Behind the camera, more than likely, is my mother.

The pad of concrete we poured that day would become the floor of an outdoor bunker where my father would pile shredded, sweet-smelling silage cut from the leftover corn stalk stubble in the fall and then feed to our cattle. It would be a three-sided bunker (the fourth left open so he could maneuver the skid steer into the space and scoop bucket loads of silage). The walls would be made of large and flat concrete slabs, the kind you might see at roadway construction sites, stacked on edge four high, as tall as two men. In the final stage, earth would be pushed against the outside of the walls with a bulldozer to keep the structure from falling outward.

The men, farmers with families and places of their own, are in their thirties and forties. They showed up just as the sun was rising, wearing blue jeans worn at the knees, laced up work boots, and cotton t-shirts they pulled from a pack of three. They are helping my father because at one time he helped or will help them. He will have bought doughnuts that morning, a box of glazed and iced long johns. The men will come and go throughout the day, tending to chores at home but eventually returning to finish the work on our farm. My father when we are finished will say once, knowing that favors are returned, “That’s good. Thanks.”

The picture depicts a time of prosperity and change. A time of progression and building: positive flux. If it is the summer of 1983, then I am five, and my father is 37—Jake and Ray are a few years younger. They are men in their prime, of good health. Machinery abounds, yet they use their bodies as primary tools of the work. The shovel is an extension of the arm. The trowel that cleans the frayed edge, a hand. These men will lean into the work; I will witness them lean into one another, against the heft of a wall or in the precarious setting of trusses. Their connection to one another is harbored by the sharing of work.

As I think of this photo further, I wonder why Chad is not there. At the time, Chad would have been twelve. Is he out of the frame? Is he off the farm that day? Of the four children, Chad and I were the most likely to be helping our father. Heath, the oldest, always had his own agendas away from the farm, and Erin, three years younger than I, never seemed to realize it was a working farm where she lived, foregoing manual labor as one might pass up the mystery casserole dish at a potluck. No, thank you. Possibly Chad’s and my willingness to fill that role allowed for Heath and Erin’s avoidance of it. But even though Chad and I were the most likely children to be found on these jobs, I cannot remember a time when we helped Dad pour concrete together. Instead, each of us marks his place on that continuum in terms of landmarks on the farm, our names and small handprints cemented in time. Chad helped pour the parking area in front of the gold machine shop, all of the concrete flooring in the large white Morton building at the back of the farm where the big field machinery is parked for winter, the floor of a silo, and one of the old cow buildings. I was around for the building of the silage bunker in the photo, an extension of the stockyard during junior high, various odd patches around the house’s back entry, and the floor of a new building that went up when I was in college. It is possible that both of us could have been involved in building the silage bunker, but neither of us knows for sure.

Chances are that we were. Anyway, I want to remember it that way, believe that we fetched tools together then and that the work we do together on his shed is an extension of our shared lives, something like we witnessed in the men we helped all those summers.

* * *

A few days after putting in the foundation and several return trips to the hardware store, the top of the first eight-foot-high wall, pulled from the ground and hoisted into place, teetered under the long-armed shade of the grizzled elm in Chad’s backyard. Ants from the aspen trees scurried over my boots and bit my calves as I held the fourteen feet of pine studs, galvanized nails, and three-quarter-inch plywood from falling back to the ground. Once up, it rocked just slightly, finding its place on firm concrete. Then Chad tacked a long 2” x 4” to the top of each end of the wall, which when wedged into the ground at an angle held the wall in place—a trick we’d learned from watching our father.

After setting the first in place, we started on the next wall, building each one face down on the level foundation. The top and bottom of each wall was a 2” x 4” “plate” cut to the length of the wall. We aligned the plates parallel to one another on our recently dried concrete pad and connected them by six-foot studs spaced twenty-four inches apart, like a ribcage. When all of the wall studs were measured and nailed, Chad and I aligned sheets of plywood across the top of the studs (so when lifted, the plywood would be on the outside of the wall). Once the wall was a single, nailed-together-thing, we simply lifted the top and raised it into place on the foundation. I held the back wall, all twelve-by-eight feet of it, from its center, as Chad used the neighbor’s ten-pound framing nail gun to secure the previous wall and this one together at their corners. We continued like this all the way around the shed, squaring and nailing each corner as we went. Pashink. Pashink. Pashink.

Each morning, Chad and I rose to the cool desert air drifting in from open windows, pulled ourselves into thick sweatshirts, donned shorts, calf-high socks, and leather boots before drifting out of the kitchen and down the back steps with whittled-tip pencils resting behind our ears. In a matter of minutes, the whine and kick of the saw on wood and the raucous slam of the hammer consumed the silent morning. The sight and smell of sawdust filled the air—a symbol of progress for us. The Stellar jay flew its perch until there was enough room for its return and cackle. In no time we would shed our sweatshirts and drape them over the backs of backyard chairs. I wore calluses on my hands, pulled splinters from my fingers, brushed away sawdust after using the chop saw to cut lumber to length.

The reality was that in constructing this shed, the shed was, in turn, constructing my summer. Jokingly, Chad and I christened this twelve-by-fourteen feet patch of land in his urban backyard, “the jobsite,” and we carried on like construction men. “Damned near finished here,” we’d say, hiking up our pants as we gauged board lengths and widths, and laughed. For us, time that summer was measured by how long it took us to run out of a box of twelve penny, two-and-a-half-inch galvanized framing nails, a short stack of three-quarter-inch sheets of standard OSB plywood, piles and piles of 2” x 4” studs, or to run for burritos or pizza or refills of coffee. That summer was measured in feet and inches. It was squared, leveled, plumbed, balanced, aligned, and straightened until true. Everything had its place, and was fitting. Each day I gave myself over to the work, because that is what I knew of it. I was staring, once again, with covetous eyes at the lives of men I knew. I wanted their strength and knowledge and skill. I longed to have friends as loyal and to share in work with others. Back then, as a boy, I dreamed of having my father’s life one day. Now, I thought I was in some little way living it, sharing in work with my brother, bridging a gap.

A day or two after Chad and I finished raising the four walls, I walked through the opening where the door would soon go and panned the enclosure. The walls’ ribs stood straight up and down, twenty-four inches apart, each equally holding the weight of the whole. Yet, they hugged open space. The room felt much smaller than the weight the walls had suggested when we lifted them into place. It struck me as so noticeably empty there, even though we had spent an entire day constructing the walls and bringing them flush with one another and securing them to bolts we had jammed into the concrete before it dried. Stepping into the half shed, I noticed a subtle drop in temperature—one thing that could be held by the walls, though only temporarily. At night, the concrete and wood had absorbed the cool desert air, which remained until midday. But as soon as the sun rose to its pinnacle, peering over the plywood, the cool air would be replaced by warmth.

Eventually my eyes lifted, out the wide top, past two large limbs of elm and the fingertips of aspen, and fixed on the squared-in blue sky. My view from inside the walls left the edge of blue sharp, squared on 90-degree corners, focused.

* * *

During days of that summer I pounded nails and laid tarpaper off a ten-foot ladder; at night I huddled with Carrie under the heavy down comforter of our bed in Chad’s dank basement reading novels and leafing through graduate writing program pamphlets. She studied information the Museum had given her to better understand the local flora and fauna she would need to know to relay to the high school interns she advised. Holding a paperback, I could still feel the grip of the nail gun in my hands, the recoil of its released pressure tingling in my arms and fingers, and the weight of numerous boards I had carried during the day over my shoulder. Lasting residual work from “the jobsite.”

At night I forecasted another narrative. One day you work on the foundation, and when that dries you build four walls, and when those are up you install a roof, and so on. Until you finish. Then, you start to build again. At the end of the summer, Chad and Sarah would start building a new life for two years in Egypt, Carrie and I would return to Iowa City, and I would work on blueprints for another stint in college, graduate school.

By early August, we had finished roofing and shingling, worked our way around the shed with long-board shiplap cedar siding, painted the trim deep green and the door brick red to match their house. Just above the door, we ran a footboard across the width of the shed and painted it green, which split the bottom half of shiplap siding, a lighter color of cedar, from the top half of dark auburn cedar shingles that we ran to the peak. Just under the over-hanging roof ledge, looking as if they held it up, we placed three wooden angle braces, one at the peak and one halfway down each slope, jutting straight out, making the shed look like a miniature bungalow, a style of house that lines nearly every downtown street in Bend. I stepped back from our work to take it in.

Someone, maybe Chad, maybe me, stood in front of the shed at the end of that summer and took a picture, squaring it perfectly within the frame. And now I’m thinking about that difference, the difference between the image of the shed and my standing within arm’s reach of it or, more specifically, the difference between a captured stasis and the fleeting, now gone forever, seconds I held there in a space, the raised wood grain fading from my fingers. I own both: the photograph and the space. I would go on to graduate school and write from a place somewhere between the Midwest and Oregon. I would contact Chad to clarify the details and discover some new ones. I would hold up the photograph, recast the summer, and expose details in an attempt to make some sort of meaning with stories, most of which are mine, and some that are not. The photograph shows me clearly how it was, but the space reminds me nothing is that clear.

* * *

1987. Maybe it’s autumn. I am nine. Chad is a sophomore in high school. In the hayloft of the large white barn that opens and spills out into the cattle yard close to our boxy, Illinois farm house, he and his friends have built a basketball hoop eight-and-a-half feet off the loft floor among the stacks of square bales that reach to the rafters. They have restacked the bales so that there is enough of the plank floor to play two-on-two games against one another, duct tape demarcating the free throw and three-point lines.

One night they allow me to join them in the loft—there may have been other nights, but my memory narrows to these details. They listen to music from radios fed power by fifty-foot extension cords snaking out the loft door and dropped from this place in the air to the ground. They shoot and play while I do my best not to get trampled. During breaks, they sit staggered in the rows of bales sipping cans of soda while I dribble the ball innocently and laugh at their jokes, which I don’t understand. I am in heaven.

Eventually, one of Chad’s friends sets up a bale for me to jump from in order to get me closer to the hoop. But one bale isn’t enough—eight-and-a-half feet is a tall order for a nine-year-old. So the guys start building progressions of stairs using bales to bring me even closer. But the trouble with this design is twofold: first, when trying to run up the balestairs, I lose momentum and the final step is more of a stand-and-jump rather than a lunge, and second, three or four bales on top of one another creates a precarious, wobbly base from which to jump. In the end, the attempt is thoughtful but fruitless. So Chad tells me to grab a ball, hooks me under my armpits, and lifts me toward the hoop. He holds me as I throw the ball down and hang there. I feel the tension in the springs behind the hoop give. I feel the cool metal of the hoop. I feel the hairs stand up on my neck. At that moment I believe that my brother has built this place for me. But this is where my story of that time ends.

Chad’s story of that season begins with cowshit. He and his friends tromp through cowshit, drag extension cords through cowshit, then finally produce a plank system over cowshit to get to the one ladder at the center of the barn that leads to the loft—a makeshift bridge that connects them to the space above the muck. Once in the loft, they organize all of the bales to make the court, including some very precarious stacking to get up to the ceiling to change light bulbs that went out. They cut the backboard out of several layers of plywood and measure the distance from the floor and bolt it to the barn’s cross rafters and paint it black. The hoop is fixed to the crude backboard with tired and rusty springs from a square bailer, custom made so that the rim will give and draw back when someone jams a ball through it. The construction survives the two remaining years that Chad is at home before going to college and even into my high school days, until a towering friend of mine comes crashing to the floor one day with the hoop still in his hand.

I know now what I did not know then because I was a boy and life was made of play. Chad began construction of this space about nine months after our farm sale took place (an event I can’t place in my memory), when the bank made my parents sell much of the farm equipment to pay down our farm debt. This was the heart of the 1980s farm crisis that would eventually force thousands of families across the Midwest into uncontrollable debt, off their inherited farms, and through emotional strife. Chad remembers every night the news telling of the people who lost it, like the Farmers Home Administration supervisor from South Dakota who killed his wife, daughter, son and dog in their sleep, then crept down the stairs to his office and shot himself. “The job has got pressure on my mind,” he left in a note beside him. These were very real fears.

The day that Chad nailed a ladder to the outside of the barn up to the loft door so that he and his friends wouldn’t have to walk through the slough anymore, the bank had asked our father to meet with prospective buyers of our farm—the sale of the equipment hadn’t been enough to call off the bank. They even asked if he would give the tour. If an offer had been made, we would have had to move. (It wouldn’t be made: we were of the lucky few.) But Chad watched our father walk out to meet them from the loft window—the man who had taught my brother how to work a pair of pliers with one hand, how to drive a car for the first time, and how to hold a bottle above a Suffolk lamb’s head so it wouldn’t take in too much air while drinking. I convinced myself, ever since that night in the loft, that Chad had built the court for me because I liked to play basketball with my friends, a childish and innocent reality. But really, he crossed the impermanent bridge to his suspended loft day after day for reasons I did not know then. It was a place where he went to get away from the fear and be a kid, carefree and goofy—a buffer of bales lining the walls.

At the time, however, I was too young to see or feel these realities. I got rides to town to stay overnight with elementary school friends and joined little league baseball and peewee football. There will always be that separation between our lives—always that impermanence. The only permanence in our lives together, it seems, is distance. As I write, Chad has returned from four years in Africa to live in Bend, and I have moved from graduate school in Idaho for a teaching job in Wisconsin. Our lives will always diverge; our experiences and knowledge are separated by almost a decade. But there are moments when our paths cross, moments when our memories collide in an attempt to recover the brothers we once were or are or never were together, blurring the roles that we have been given in life. Ironically, it is in building the structures where we house our lives when we come together now, as our reflections on separate lives as boys working with our father define our pasts. Even now, through the kitchen sink window of Carrie’s and my house in Wisconsin, I sight the backyard for the placement of a cement slab, envision, already, the pitch of the roof and the windows that will usher sunlight into a new garage, and there on ladders at either side of a wall lifting a length of siding into place, brothers leaning in.

* * *

Three days before Chad and Sarah left for Cairo, and four days before Carrie and I returned to the Midwest, I was dipping a wide paintbrush into a pail of clear sealant and applying it to the last of the cedar boards that covered the shed. It was finished. Carrie was at the museum; Chad and Sarah were inside the house, packing their six huge duffle bags with two years of summer clothes. After I swiped the last board, I closed the lid to the sealant, rested the brush on top, and walked out of the heat and into the cool darkness of the shed.

I could smell the acrid hint of cement hardening in the closed space—a whiff of boyhood. My eyes adjusted, and I was finally able to make out the stacks of possessions Chad and Sarah had moved from their house to this spot, not more than fifty feet away. Lampshades lay on boxes that rested on tables and chairs. Rolled-up rugs cushioned the storage of various pictures and wall hangings. An antique trunk and wooden crates had been tucked into a space toward the back of the shed, remaining out of sight and out of use for at least two years (though, eventually, it would turn into four). Each thing said something about Chad or Sarah, was tied to one or both emotionally—a weathered metal sign hanging from a side wall declaring bicycle repair echoed Chad’s passion for bicycles, the antique oak roll top desk Sarah’s dad gave to her, the slim cabinet Chad made of old trim and a window from Sarah’s childhood home where they stored cookbooks and atlases, the dining room table (one of their first purchases together), their marriage certificate filed away in a sealed Rubbermaid container. I was struck by how this space now held so much of them, their lives, and how it held so little of mine.

But on my way out of the shed to rinse the brush, I noticed the pencil etchings. Numbers, actually—figures drawn out on the stud that framed the doorway. They were in my brother’s handwriting, a measured scroll opposed to my slashes and heavy markings. I remembered them from the door installment. Chad wrote the measurements on this 2” x 4” so that we had our bearings when trying to find the center of the doorway.

As I hunted deeper into the darkness, I found more figures on the studded walls—more of my slashes, more of his measured scroll. 34”x 48”: the size of a piece of plywood needing cut. Notch cut at 28”: the point at which we cut a small triangle out of the rafters to allow for a two-foot overhang. Chalk, two boxes roofing nails, roll of tarpaper, 3/8”drill bit: things needed on the next run to the hardware store.

We had left our hieroglyphics to be found, like the names we had fingered in the cool concrete as boys at every edge of our parent’s farm. The shed held our mark on this time and place—it defined this crossing of paths. That summer with Chad was a sequence of futures—now that’s finished, what comes next? We had sharpened our pencils and put them to paper or raw wood, an act of measurement, so we would remember where we had been and where, separately together, we were going.

 

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