Author Michael Perry finds his art living and working in rural Wisconsin.
Author Michael Perry finds his inspiration in rural Wisconsin.
The third memoir by Wisconsin author Michael Perry is “Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting”.
It was a lush, sunny day, but somehow I found myself in a pit of my brain anyway.
I came from a culture of abandonment and work, but have come to understand that this line of thinking is not universally useful and, in some cases, deadly.
Earlier today I was in touch with a farmer who was helping other farmers find safe refuge from the dark seas of depression. You can’t work on what won’t go away.
So when I grabbed the splitting ax and walked over to the ridge where the loggers left a coffee table-sized slice of oak trunk lying flat in the grass, I knew it better than thinking I was supposedly manly or undergoing treatment; I was simply relying on the sun and sweat to reset my system.
We have a motorized hydraulic divider and it works wonderfully, but that piece of oak was too big for me to hoist it on board without first assembling a strike team consisting of an orthopedist, chiropractor, a sports psychologist and a tub of liniment.
And yeah, for you splitter specialists, I can indeed pull a pin and put the rig to work vertically, but this little adventure was not about efficiency. I also didn’t want him to be suffocated by earplugs and fouled by exhaust fumes.
Visible from my site, there was – apart from a scattering of silver silo caps – several hundred square kilometers of wavy green capped with an infinity of blue. While I’m all for internal combustion, today’s goal was not to use it, but to defuse it.
