Page 82 of At First Dance
“Dirt!”
“A song,” Shoe-Hands says, deadpan. Ivy tries not to laugh but doesn’t quite manage it. “You might be onto something,” she tells him.
I don’t move from my post near the barn. I don’t need to. She has them. She doesn’t turn herself into a parade. She makes the room smaller, and every kid feels like the page belongs to them. When the book girl waits, Ivy asks what they’d plant.A purple bike.A puppy.A thunder that’s only sound.A new friend.That one lands in my ribs like a truth you didn’t see coming but recognize anyway. I keep my eyes on the oak’s bark and tell myself I’m just checking for beetles like a man who isn’t soft.
We finish the book with a soft “The end.” Five kids don’t move. Ivy hums a simple little refrain—four lines about water and sun and stubborn roots—and by the second pass, the whole blanket hums with her. She doesn’t even look at me, and I know exactly what it feels like to breathe easier because she’s here.
“Okay,” she says, settling the book on the crate. “Want to meet actual chickens?”
We do the rules again. I’m better at rules than songs. “We’re going to move as a group,” I tell them. “I’ll show. Miss Ivy will help. Miss Bailey will make sure nobody rides the chickens.”
A hand shoots up. “Can we ride the chickens?”
“Absolutely not,” I say, dry enough that two parents laugh. Shoe-Hands looks at me like I just told the best joke anyone’s ever thought of.
We start at the coop. I open the latch slowly and walk them through it like my hands are a picture book. “We’re quiet in here. We don’t chase. We collect like we’re surgeons.” Ivy crouches beside me with the basket, and we ask who has careful fingers. Seven careful fingers appear. I pick two. Ivy guides them through the straw.
An egg lands in a palm, and the kid whispers, “It’s warm,” like this is the first true thing he’s learned today. It probably is.
We wash up at the foot pump I rigged last winter when the old handle stuck. “Look at you,” Ivy murmurs, not for show, just for me. I shrug like it’s nothing and put another cup under a small pair of hands.
In the pasture, I bring Jasper to the fence and put his nose on the rail. He sucks attention like a shop vac and pretends he doesn’t. “One at a time,” I say. “He likes his forehead rubbed, not his eyeballs.” They giggle like I invented comedy. Butterscotch comes up behind me with the swagger of a calf who thinks she’s queen. She sneezes directly on Ivy’s shin.
“She loves you,” Ivy tells the kids.
“She’s marking you for later,” I mouth back.
I clock a little girl at the edge. Pink medical bracelet, careful posture, the way worry wraps kids’ shoulders in a pattern you only learn if you’ve had to unlearn it yourself. Ivy sees her too because of course she does. She doesn’t point. She doesn’t coax. She brushes Butterscotch slowly, the big sure strokes you’d use on a skittish horse, and lets the girl come to the brush instead of the other way around. After a minute, Rowan’s Rule of Farm Miracles does its thing. The kid steps in, takes the handle, and the calf leans like we put this moment here just for her.
“Brave looks good on you,” Ivy says, quiet enough to be just for one set of ears. The kid’s shoulders stop trying to tuck under her earlobes. I swallow something that tastes like gratitude and cedar.
We move to the starter table I've set up under the pecans, with trays, a bucket of potting mix, and a bowl of beans. “Pinch,” I say, showing thumb and forefinger. “Drop. Cover. Press.” They say it back like a chant. Bailey keeps time with a paper cup. Dirt becomes a possibility a dozen times over. It’s messy in the rightways. One kid dumps half his water on his shirt. Shoe-Hands wants to name the worms. “Sir Wiggles,” Ivy pronounces, and now I guess we have a worm with a title.
I don’t perform for the parents. I don’t coo. I show. I wait. I say, “Yeah, that’s it,” when a kid gets the seed to settle one knuckle deep because work should feel like you did something. I watch Ivy be ten different kinds of patient, and I swear I feel a hinge give way inside my chest. The thought I’ve been holding under my tongue for weeks—maybe I could do this, not once, but again—raises its head like it wants sun.
By the time we circle back under the oak, we’ve got ten little starters labeled in crooked kid handwriting, two empty water coolers, and a flock of tired happy. Ivy sets the book back on her knee, but the kids steal the moment—one at a time onto the crate, telling me and her what their seed will be.A bike.A puppy.Thunder that’s only sound.A friend who stays.I could listen to them all afternoon. We don’t. We hand out juice. We recycle cups. Bailey schedules two more mornings while I’m standing right there.
Parents drift. One mom with an anxious mouth thanks me with both hands. A dad asks if he can come back and help fix a gate because he misses using a hammer. The polka-dot girl presses the warm egg into Ivy’s palm with ceremonial solemnity. “So you don’t forget,” she says. Ivy’s mouth wobbles, and I pretend I don’t see it because I know how to give people the dignity of not being watched when they feel.
We wave the last car through the oaks. Dust hangs and falls. Quiet returns in a hurry, the kind the farm carries when the day has done what it came for.
I carry the crate back to the porch. I tip the cooler and watch the last line of water catch sunlight on its way out. When I turn, Ivy’s still under the oak, knees up, chin planted. She’slooking at the footprints, the smudged blanket outlines, like a general surveying a good kind of battle.
“You were good,” I say. It comes out rougher than I meant. I clear my throat. “With them.”
She tips me a grin that’s more edges than teeth. “They make it easy.” She looks past me toward the pasture. “You were… you.” She lets it sit like that. “It worked.”
I don’t know what to do with praise. I keep it anyway. “Nobody rode a chicken.”
“They considered it.” She angles her chin toward the coop, where Pancake the goat is plotting something she doesn’t have the attention span to finish. We both chuckle, and I feel my shoulders drop an inch I didn’t realize they’d taken on.
I sit beside her and scrub a hand over my jaw. The egg’s still in her palm, warm from one small hand to another. I want to say I’m sorry for dragging my feet. I want to say I’m scared of making something public that I can’t control once it lives outside the fences. I want to sayI’m better at mending than starting, and I don’t want that to be true anymore. What I say is simpler.
“They listened,” I tell the oak. “Even when I didn’t make it… fancy.”
“Fancy’s overrated,” she says. “Showing is enough.” She leans her shoulder into mine, light, cautious, like checking the integrity of a new board with your palm. I lean back the same amount. The measure feels right.
“Bailey says she can bring another group next week,” she adds, casual if you don’t know her tells. I do. She’s watching me without moving her eyes.
