Bill was thirty-four the summer his father finally agreed they needed more space. The old dairy operation had outgrown itself, and somewhere between the second cutting of hay and the first frost there had been a family meeting nobody wrote down. They would build a new post-and-beam barn, and they would do it themselves.

His brother Pete drove up from Harrisburg with a borrowed truck and two weeks of vacation. Their father drew the plans on the back of an envelope — he had built enough things in his life that he didn’t need paper — and by the end of the first week the frame was standing.

Bill remembered the smell of it — new pine and dry grass and diesel from the generator they borrowed from the Hendersons next farm over. The whole thing went up in eleven days. When they raised the last beam there was no ceremony, just his father standing back with his hands on his hips looking at it like it was a argument he had won.