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Showing posts from August, 2026

A Week of Training

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  A Week of Training 7 Aug 2026 The garage door rumbled up, and I was shocked. His truck sat in its spot, hood still warm, angled just enough that he could open the door and swing his legs out without banging his knee on the shelf of paint cans. I stood there in the doorway, the late afternoon sun at my back, my brain taking an extra beat to catch up. He was home. Not supposed to be home. Not for another half hour at least. But there the truck was, and there the empty hooks by the door were, his boots already kicked off and lined up neat and waiting. My heart did something complicated—a flutter and a drop and a twist all at once. The week had been brutal. The district had rolled out a new mandatory training series on Monday, three straight days of compliance modules and meetings and PowerPoint slides that could have been emails. Everything had to be documented. Everything had to be submitted through a portal that kept crashing. The engineering lab I was supposed to be setting up—th...

Wednesday - Day three

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  Wednesday. Day three. His truck pulled out of the garage and down the driveway at 7:42 AM, gravel crunching under the tires, and I stood at the kitchen window watching the red taillights disappear down the county road. The house settled into silence around me. No rooster crowing—I’d already let the chickens out. No donkey braying—he’d been fed at 6:15, his hay net stuffed full, his water trough scrubbed and refilled. I’d been up since 5:30, moving through the barn while the sky was still that bruised purple-gray that comes just before dawn. The stalls needed mucking—really needed it, the kind of deep clean I’d been putting off for a week. The pitchfork was cold in my hands, the metal handle rough with rust. I worked methodically, forking soiled bedding into the wheelbarrow, the muscles in my shoulders and lower back burning with the familiar ache of honest labor. The donkey watched me from his paddock, his big dark eyes tracking my movements. He brayed once, halfheartedly, when I...