Twelve by Twelve Read Online Free PDF Page B

season, they call it, with the skeletons of birch and oak and the sticky buds of leaves to come. Stalks of winter wheat, hoary vines on the trellises, and last year’s asparagus. And silence.
    I walked down to the creek, listened to it murmur, stuck a finger in. Frigid. I yanked my frozen finger out. Beyond the creek, a rolling terrain with more late-winter woods, pasture, and a higher forest beyond the pasture, all of the landscape edged with a crisp gray sky. I stopped for a moment to pick an empty cocoon from a branch, noticing a crack where the butterfly had emerged and flown out into life. As the lifeless shell crunched between my cold fingers, turning to a dry, useless powder, I wondered what in the world I was doing here. Should I have come at all?
    I could be helping Liberian refugees , I thought, saving rainforests in Bolivia, or distributing malaria-preventing bednets . The things I was trained to do. Or if I was to be in America, I should be making myself useful, working twelve-hour days at the UN pressing for better refugee policies or sending out scathing op-eds and speaking at conferences. But this, pardon me, dead place just made me feel the deadness of the society around me even more. That dead pond in theindustrial park; the techno-hospital’s fast food. Trapped in a looping mind, I reasoned that coming to the 12 × 12 had been a mistake.
    At night I’d sometimes light a little bonfire outside and listen to the hiss and sizzle, look into the orange coals, and stare at the stars, as cold up there as I was down below. The fire would die out, and I’d climb the 12 × 12’s ladder to Jackie’s loft and try to get cozy in her bed. I’d have no dreams at all. It was as if the nonlife, the frigidity of the place, was mirrored in my dreams. In that tiny house, snuggled in a vast forest, secluded in its upper loft, my spirit felt as fallow as the scene around me.
    A warm pile of eggs is what would begin to thaw me out. My eleven-year-old neighbor, Kyle Thompson, beckoned to me one morning as I walked up Jackie’s dirt road toward Old Highway 117 South. He asked me if I was living at Jackie’s, and I nodded. Without further introductions, he took my sleeve and led me over to the important business at hand: a disheveled woodpile, where a Muscovy duck squatted over her nest. With a stick, Kyle prodded the duck gently to reveal a large pile of eggs beneath her in a bed of hay and feathers. “We’re going to have fourteen ducklings,” he said, a little proudly.
    I looked at Kyle. His thick, dun-brown hair flopped above a pair of blue eyes. He had a couple of freckles under each eye and a slight tilt to his head. Though I later found out he wanted to be an engineer, and I had already discovered his love of animal husbandry, his facial expression suggested how I pictured the young James Joyce in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man . I looked back down at the eggs. Kyle spoke excitedly about the ducklings to come, but I was doubtful. Amid the frost-covered wood and gray background, they looked like cold marble, fossilized dinosaur eggs, things not destined to bring forth life.
    Kyle was practically the only person I saw during those frigid first days at the 12 × 12. The colorful cast of neighbors Jackie had described — Mexican furniture makers, permaculture pioneers, and even Kyle’s parents, the Thompsons — all seemed to be inhibernation. Even Kyle I didn’t see much; sometimes I’d spot him a football field’s length away, across the field and pond, looking expectantly into his woodpile, talking to the mother duck, trying to persuade life to happen. I was otherwise alone. I felt bare to the point of barren, just another skeleton, like the plants or the dark new moon.
    What was I to do? “Not do, be ,” Jackie had told me. In her invitation note, she mentioned that she was not asking me to house-sit or farm-sit. Her guidance was clear: I was simply to sit. It would become apparent that, for all the