if he wants to.” He cried when the nettles stung him, and milk rushed to my breasts. I folded him in my arms. But Karen beamed with pride to watch the rash tendril down his chubby arms. She called it proof of his vigorous circulation. She declared that he’d never be sick a day in his life.
Karen said we should leave everything to wildness, including our son. But if she wanted to let things go, it didn’t make her more relaxed. Practicing, she called it. Preparing. The way she saw it, wildness took work.
* * *
I watched Karen whittling what looked like a chain, for what purpose I couldn’t say. At least it wasn’t another spoon. We had a kitchen full of those molding away, little wooden marbles rattling around in their handles. I watched Perley next to her, jumping up and down, like he was training for some contest. I watched the black snake on the windowsill behind him flick its tail. Lazy. Satisfied. Helen snapped her binder shut.
“Finished!” she said, then looked thoughtful. “Actually it’ll never really be finished,” she said. “We can keep adding to it forever. But it’s ready to be shared.”
“Oh, rejoice,” Karen said.
“Sharing! Rejoicing! Sharing! Rejoicing!” Perley said. He put his socks on his hands and kept bouncing.
“And it’s not really a to-do list,” Helen said. “Or, it started out as one, but now it’s a gift. It’s a gift from me to this land. To our family.” She held up the binder so that we could not help but see what she’d written across its cover in permanent marker: Best Practices.
“Best Practices?” Karen asked. “What is this, some kind of corporate retreat?”
Helen looked hurt. “It’s helpful,” she said. “It has everything in it.” She held it out to me.
Reluctantly, I took the binder, opened it to the first page, which read, “A Compendium of Helpful Strategies and Methods for Optimum Daily Living.” Karen set aside her whittling and came to look over my shoulder. Perley kept up his sofa exercises, making what he thought of as the sound of a motor.
“Optimum?” Karen said. “Where do you get this shit?”
I turned the page.
The Best Practices Binder seemed at first to be a how-to-homestead guide, an imitation of the books that Helen had studied. There was a page about the proper procurement of roadkill. Best to get a deer that wasn’t there when you went into town, but appeared on your way back out. That way you know exactly how long it’s been lying there. There were instructions on how to kill tree of heaven. Don’t bother trying to uproot it or cut it down. Instead, scrape its bark off in a circle all the way around the trunk. There was a page about duck slaughtering, a page of notes on knife sharpening. Drawings of edible mushroom varieties, with notes about each one. Look for morels in the creek beds, near clusters of mayapples. Oyster mushrooms smell like anise, can be found along aspen logs. A page about acorn gathering: Two fifty-five-gallon barrels should get a family of four through the winter, but just barely. For higher calorie count, gather the acorns from the ground so that you get the ones with grubs in them. Kindling: Preferably poplar or ash, never elm, never red oak. Firewood: Remember that the old-timers brought in wood two years ahead of when they planned to burn it. There was a recipe for pickling nasturtium seed, a diagram of an effective drainage ditch, rocks and pebbles lined up according to size. Helen had done it all on lined notebook paper in a tidy cursive hand.
“Useful,” I admitted, but Karen tapped her foot, annoyed.
I kept turning pages, and the Best Practices Binder began to change. How to Press the Coffee: Fill to brim, wait three minutes, press slowly so that any coffee that spills can be caught in a porcelain mug. What to Do with Bananas: Only peel one if you are ready to eat the whole thing. Butter Knife: Lick it clean so as not to attract ants. Where to Park the Truck: Use the empty oil drum and the scrap metal pile as markers. Tea: Boil only two cups of water rather than filling the whole pot. Tea Bags: Reuse. Water: On cold nights, leave it at a drip, but so that you can see only two drops fall per minute, no more and no less. Dishes: Consider giving your dirty dish to someone who hasn’t eaten yet to