She didn’t say anything to that.
She got up and cut me a second piece of pie. That was her way of saying she thought I was wrong, and she was going to let me find it out myself.
The ground under that pivot is a silt loam that warms up slow. Dad never put a seed in it until the soil was fifty degrees at four inches deep, at seven in the morning, three days running. He kept a soil thermometer on a nail in the shop just for that.
He kept everything else in a little green pocket notebook. Planter settings. Seed population. Which nozzle package was on the pivot. How the well was pumping. Which tower liked to stick.
The soil hit fifty the last week of April.
Butch Sedlacek, who farms the section just east of Dad’s, had his planter rolling on the twenty-eighth. I know because I filled his dry spreader that week.
