What I felt, going in the grow room, was trouble trouble trouble beaming at me from the walls. Bright lights were suspended from the ceiling. The light bounced off the walls, which were covered in silver insulation, nail-gunned into place, on every side of the room, even the ceiling, to keep in the heat and light. The fans ran daily, ventilating the space. The air was fecund, a lushness you could feel. Someone had to move the plants, heavy in their plastic pots of earth, every day, switching out the plants under the lamps, and the ones closest to the fans, rotating so that every leaf got the same amount of light and warmth, every plant had a chance.

Someone—usually me—had to do the other work of keeping the farm running while the basement hummed on. The daily maintenance, the chores and the crises: always keeping the wild back, keeping the farm from teetering into decay, the weeds pushing at the door of the house like hungry children. I was always beating back nature, bending it into working for me, ripping out the multiflora rose thorns, hacking and burning hemlock, spraying aphids off the pot.

The summer chores were difficult. But winter was dire, made up of essential tasks necessary just to survive. And now winter was everywhere. Winter was always. Winter was the fire, the fire, the fire—keeping the stoves going and the water running, which meant remembering to leave the taps on a trickle at night and sometimes hiking up to the cistern and either chopping at the ice crust on top, or running a hairdryer on the pipes closest to the surface if they froze. Or, if I couldn’t unfreeze the pipes and it was biting cold, lugging buckets of fresh water from the cistern back to the house.

But the fire. The fire needed to be fed always, and with Lobo and Mama busy in the grow room—turning the plants, picking bugs off the plants, trimming the leaves from the plants—the fire fell to me.

Soon it all did, all the work. Lobo knew somebody in California. The man had a house and fields, needed a grower. After the first cold year, the year the outdoor harvest died, the first time we skipped spring, Lobo and Mama went on ahead to check it out. They left me alone with the farm.