as Will refers to it. It always sounds like an official name. I still think of it as The Farmhouse or, just as often, Enge’s House. The carriage shed, like the ancient corn crib near it and the huge red barn out in back, has seen better days. For some time, the four white posts that held it up in front were rotted at the base, like incisors going bad. The roof swooped down toward the middle, graceful but lowering. My wife and I finally decided that with some money to spend and with my medical circumstance and with our kids employed and with the imagined avuncular disapproval of the shed’s condition reaching us from the Other Side, the Workers’ Paradise—“I knew you couldn’t keep this place up, boy”—we would have the building fixed. I call the guy who has done some work for us in the past. He says it’s not for him, but he knows the perfect person for it. Another guy, named Bruce, who loves to work on shoring up old buildings like this. Bruce, a big, bearish man with a constant congenial smile and a shy affect, comes to check out the situation.
