She saw to it that Perley only ate from the garden, from the forest, or from my breasts. I pumped three times a day to keep my supply up, so Perley would have milk even when I wasn’t there. No bread. No grain. No sugar. She gave him bones to chew on, made sure that Helen saved all the organ meat from the animals she found, spooned groundhog liver into his mouth. “I don’t want him to lose his taste for bitter,” she said. “We have to fight the endless monotony of salt and sweet.”

When Perley learned to walk, Karen frowned at me when I carried him. “Never do for a child what he can do for himself,” she said. She whittled tools that were just Perley’s size, a rake and a shovel, a pitchfork, a pick, a mallet. He wanted her to play with him but she said, “You’re better than that, Perley. You can work with me.” In the spring, we harvested nettles side by side. I tried to keep Perley from the patch, but Karen said, “Let him try it if he wants to.” He cried when the nettles stung him, and milk rushed to my breasts. I folded him in my arms. But Karen beamed with pride to watch the rash tendril down his chubby arms. She called it proof of his vigorous circulation. She declared that he’d never be sick a day in his life.

Karen said we should leave everything to wildness, including our son. But if she wanted to let things go, it didn’t make her more relaxed. Practicing, she called it. Preparing. The way she saw it, wildness took work.

I watched Karen whittling what looked like a chain, for what purpose I couldn’t say. At least it wasn’t another spoon. We had a kitchen full of those molding away, little wooden marbles rattling around in their handles. I watched Perley next to her, jumping up and down, like he was training for some contest. I watched the black snake on the windowsill behind him flick its tail. Lazy. Satisfied. Helen snapped her binder shut.

“Finished!” she said, then looked thoughtful. “Actually it’ll never really be finished,” she said. “We can keep adding to it forever. But it’s ready to be shared.”

“Oh, rejoice,” Karen said.

“Sharing! Rejoicing! Sharing! Rejoicing!” Perley said. He put his socks on his hands and kept bouncing.

“And it’s not really a to-do list,” Helen said. “Or, it started out as one, but now it’s a gift. It’s a gift from me to this land. To our family.” She held up the binder so that we could not help but see what she’d written across its cover in permanent marker: Best Practices.

“Best Practices?” Karen asked. “What is this, some kind of corporate retreat?”