It was good work, the kind that uses your hands and quiets your head.

He taught me how to read a tree, where to cut so the whole thing grew stronger, which dead wood to take so the living wood could bear.

He never rushed me.

He never once used a kindness as a debt to be collected later, never let a single thing he did for me become a thing I owed.

After six years of a man who kept a ledger on love, the sheer absence of accounting felt almost dizzying.

One rainy evening, with the light failing and the two of us sheltering under the eave of the barn, pruning shears still in his hand, he told me that former sheriff was true but incomplete.