She watched him walk in from the fields with that bail of wire over his shoulder and tool bin in his hand, the sun on the earth and his shadow following along and he was brown and green and dusty, like a root that had pulled itself out of the ground, decided laying in dirt wasn’t no way to live, and set out to see the big world.

It had been sixteen years and she looked at him, wondering what to make of him after all this time, how he could still stand so straight and say so…