HOW TO make a teepee from plastic flowers

THE TROUBLE WITH MAKING A BEANPOLE teepee is that summer usually ends before all the beans reach the top, or that the beans stop reaching for the top before summer ends. You can trick a sunflower by putting a paper bag over its head for a few hours out of the day; it will think that it's in the shadow of another sunflower, and it will try to become bigger and taller. But you must always take the bag off by noon, because if it doesn't get any sun at all, it will simply give up, and it will lie down, with its flower still facing the sky, which is far too sad a sight for summertime. Beans, however, once comfortably stretched out on a net of sticks and string, tilted toward the sun, will get sleepy and thick but will have no reason to continue to reach.

The other trouble with a beanpole teepee is that nothing grows beneath it. You will wait all summer long, which for a child is both a lifetime and an instant, and then you will crawl inside and find it to be unexpectedly dark and damp. You will feel the cold wet on your knees through your jeans before you are even all the way inside because you have watered it so many times, hoping to make it grow thick and tall, that the earth inside will be almost black with mud. You will drag in a towel or a blanket or something else, but that too will eventually feel wet, and then you will not want to go back into your beanpole teepee, and you will forget that you left some of your favorite things inside it when you went there on the longest day of the year, before its days became numbered.

This is why you should make a teepee out of plastic flowers. I know you must think I am very tacky, or very lazy, but here is what I can promise you: that when you are finished and you crawl through the opening and into your small house, you will feel whole, and satisfied, and your mind will be settled. To make anything by hand, whether it is to feed or to warm or to shelter yourself, to succeed in meeting some small — or not small — need that exists within us, this is what we and every other thing with a heart that walks this earth are meant to do with our hands and with our days. And when you are inside a structure that you have built yourself, whether your walls are made of plastic or grass or brick or beans, you will be at home.

I know this because, when I was a child, I lived on land inhabited by people who lived in houses that they had built for themselves, by hand. The only thing that these three houses had in common, apart from their rural route delivery address, was that they were built without a working knowledge of architecture or construction. All three houses, plus a century-old farmhouse that we all called The Red House, were within distant sight of each other, along the last half mile of a narrow dirt road that climbed into the mountains, growing narrower and grassier and eventually becoming a simple trail that could easily be lost before it disappeared completely into the woods.

The smallest house, and the first house that you would drive past, belonged to Donald Combs. The mountaintop was owned by my maternal grandfather, who had bought it from the Combs family, who had been there for a very long time. One of the conditions of the sale was that the family's youngest son, Donald, could stay in the small house that he had built for himself. Buying land in northern Vermont can be tricky.

We were told that Donald had been in his mother's belly when she was washing the dinner dishes, one night long ago. She had both of her hands in the water when the house was struck by a ball of lightning that had come rolling down the side of the mountain, and the water in the sink became electrified, causing Mrs. Combs to be thrown clear across the room and against the wall. She had recovered, but Donald was not like her other children, and she blamed the lightning ball.

When the processes of operation on small dairy farms were modernized in the early 1960s, mountaintop farms like the Combses' could no longer survive. Donald's extended family packed up and moved onward, to the Midwest, but Donald did not want to go anywhere. According to my grandfather, who arrived to pay for the land in cash and found the Combs family waiting for him, their cars and trucks heavily packed, Donald did not seem sad to see them go and waved them on, standing barefoot in a soft, cool patch of clover and buttercups, more than six feet tall and thin as a green bean and with the wide, excited smile of a child. When they were gone, he walked back to his little two-room house, which was made of plywood and tin and had a dirt floor. There was no running water or electricity; he had a small, black wood-burning cookstove that had a single-burner plate, and there was an outhouse that sat just downhill, at the bottom of a trail through thick green brush. In every season but winter, we would make an unsupervised pilgrimage to his house almost every day, where he would welcome us in with a broad, gappy smile, and give us silver coins and bottle caps and bent nails, and tell us that we were beautiful girls. We understood that Donald was different, and special, and harmless, and kind. When we had a wasp's nest that needed to be taken down or a raccoon that needed to be intimidated, one of us would be sent to get Donald. He would walk back home with us, always barefoot, with his shotgun over his shoulder.

Donald also liked to talk. He wasn't much of a conversationalist, just more of a talker. You could get stuck for hours if you slowed down in front of his house and he saw you in time to get in front of your car. Sometimes his fly was wide open. He wore clothing that looked to have been army issue, with his pants always slightly too short, sitting just above his narrow ankles and broad, long feet. He was barefoot by choice or habit, sometimes even when there was snow on the ground, and even when he was chopping firewood, and we made a game of counting his toes each spring. The number changed enough to keep things interesting. He was already an old man when we knew him as children, and had lost nearly all of his teeth. A family friend, a young woman who loved my uncle, took him into town one summer and bought him a set of teeth, and afterward he smiled even wider. When Donald, at a very old age, died peacefully in his sleep, there were over a hundred people at the wake, an event that was a silent, reverent testament to a man who had not hurt or angered, or even bested, a single person in his long lifetime, and had not made a single enemy. His life had been solitary and...