Because it's the fence

"Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death."* — Song of Solomon 8:6

Earl would have been eighty today.

I am not going to tell you about missing him because I have told you about that and you know, and anyway today is not a missing day. Today is a telling day. I want to tell you something about Earl.

Earl checked the fence every Sunday after church. Every Sunday. Fifty-two Sundays a year for thirty years. He would come home from Trinity and change out of his church clothes into his work clothes and eat whatever I had put on the stove and then he would walk the fence line — all of it, the whole property line, the pasture fence and the garden fence and the fence along the road. He walked it with his hands in his pockets in the winter and with a pair of pliers in the summer because there was always a wire down somewhere and he could not leave it.

I asked him once why he did it every week and he looked at me the way he looked at me when I asked a question he did not understand, which was not unkindly but with genuine confusion, and he said, "Because it's the fence."

That is the most Earl sentence I have ever heard. Because it's the fence. Because the fence is there and it needs checking and checking it is what you do on Sundays after church and he did not need a reason because the fence was the reason.

He was not a complicated man. I do not mean that the way people sometimes mean it, as if simplicity is the same thing as shallowness. Earl was as deep as the well on this property, which is a hundred and twelve feet and has never run dry. He was just clear all the way down. You could see the bottom of him if you looked, and what was at the bottom was exactly what was at the top: a man who checked the fence because it was the fence, who fed the cattle because they were the cattle, who loved his wife because she was his wife, and did not require the world to be more interesting than it was.

He had a temper. It flashed hard and rare and mostly at himself when he dropped something or hit his thumb with a hammer, and occasionally at the children in ways he would come to me about later, standing in the kitchen doorway with his cap in his hand looking like a man who knew he had done it wrong and did not know how to say so. I would say "Go tell them" and he would go tell them and he would not apologize in words because he did not have the words, but he would take them fishing or fix their bicycle or bring home ice cream, which was Earl's vocabulary for I am sorry.

He would have been eighty today. He would have been slower. He would still be checking the fence.

Love is strong as death. That is what Solomon wrote, and I have thought about that sentence for seven years, and the best I can tell you is that it is not a contest. It is not saying love wins. It is saying they are the same weight. They are the same size. You carry one the way you carry the other — with your whole body, every day, because it is there and it needs carrying.

Earl, happy birthday. The fence is still here. I check it now.