Our two milk cows, Venus and Jupiter, had a little fenced-in yard of their own below the cabin, but we loved those big, mooey girls too much to keep them locked in a world of mud and flies. So my father had threaded barbed wire through the trees in a big hoop around their pen, and every morning we let them out to roam in the woods, feasting on wild grass and moss, scratching their shoulders on the trees, napping in the shade. At dusk, we herded them into their tiny stable, just big enough for the two of them, a net of hay, a trough of water, and nothing else.

One time, a mountain cat had climbed onto the roof and screeched at them through the tin and wood, and they had lowed and hollered in fear until my father had come out, a torch in his hand, to scare the cat away.

I would remind my father of that. How the cows needed him, too.

I thought about such things as I lugged their milk up the trail to the Petersons’ that morning, Samuel far ahead of me.

The trail was steep, the milk heavy, and I knew what would happen if I tripped on a root and spilled it, so I kept my eyes on the ground until I reached that tree, there—that big old balsam fir that curtsied a little in the wind as if it had been waiting for me.

I set the pail carefully aside and, taking my knife and a scrap of leather from my pocket, ducked under the tree’s prickly skirts and ran my hands along the rough bark until I felt the blister where I’d recently cut a branch to chip into tea for my mother.

The tree hadn’t seemed to mind sharing what it had to share.

The blister was the size of my thumb, its skin tough, a hard bubble. When I pierced it with the tip of my knife, the sap inside oozed out onto the blade, and I wiped it onto the scrap of leather over and over until I had a sticky dollop that I folded up carefully and slid into my pocket.

Then I cleaned my knife by plunging it into the dirt and scraping it against a rock again and again before slipping it, too, into my pocket.

Until now, the sap from this tree had healed our small wounds, glued the tip of my mother’s finger back on after she sliced it nearly off with a carving knife, made us new skin when we needed time to knit ourselves back to whole.

I didn’t know if it could fix anything already scarred over, but I saw no harm in trying, though I knew it would make an unholy mess.

I also knew a mess was not the worst thing that could happen.