Free From the Top by Michael Perry Page A

mouldering in the rafters of the garage you give it fair consideration, but then one day you’re working on a book about your old truck and you want to tell the story of the fake parking ticket, and because you are blessed with a Midwestern work ethic and a healthy dose of OCD, you spend the better part of an afternoon sweating and bumping your bald head up there in the rafters, all hunched over and riffling through vintage dentist appointment reminders until—Victory!—three hours later you find the fake parking ticket and the story winds up in the book and that justifies everylast box in the garage, even the one containing flat racquetballs and rusty roller skates.
    Then you are hired to compose a video essay based on the state of your garage and you pull out the bag of shoes you’ve been collecting since you were a freshman in high school and as you describe how fleet of foot this mouse-gnawed New Balance racing flat made you back in the days before you were dragging around all your bad habits, you realize this is not junk, this is a goldmine, a repository of fungible history that can theoretically be converted into health insurance premiums, and so you move the cars out of the garage for good and continue to accumulate accumulations.
    But then you move to a farm, and instead of one garage, you now have one garage and two pole barns. Two BIG honkin’ pole barns. Those pole barns are nothing fancy, but they are vastly capacious, and now with all that extra room not only do I expand my—ahem—archives, I also find it perfectly natural to spend the afternoon dumpster diving for bricks at a construction site, or trucking home a giant stack of vintage insulation, or adding to my collection of distressed windowpanes, or taking delivery of thirty-seven plastic pails that smell like pickles.
    This week there was a family meeting. My wife. Me. And a calendar. Upon which five days in June are now highlighted and labeled DUMPSTER WEEK.
    At our house, my wife is in charge of reality, so I’m going along with the plan. I did broach the idea of “fungible history,” but the look I received in return implied that if I kept it up one day I would step through the pole barn door and find myself greeted by fifteen concerned family members and a television crew.
    In a preemptive move designed to steel myself against the arrival of the dread dumpster, I have been polishing up a few of my most precious possessions and offering them for sale on Craigslist and eBay, which leads me to ask: how many gallons of Febreze are required to obscure the scent of mouse pee permeating four pickup loads of used insulation?
CHICKEN COOP CAMPOUT
    Last week I wound up sleeping in our brand new chicken coop, which at first might sound as if it’s going to be a tale of marital woe, but thankfully this is not the case. No, this is a story about being a dad, or trying to be a dad.
    I got a late start in that department, meeting my elder daughter—my given daughter, as I call her—when she was three and I was in my late thirties. Amy has proceeded to light up my life in ways I did not anticipate. Of course she has also thrown me into the bottomless pits of uncertainty, as that is what children do to grownups who think they have it all figured out. You just never know if you’re doing the right thing or not. Shortly after we met I taught her to perform pantomime dog tricks. That is, I would tell her to sit and she would sit. I would tell her to roll over and she would roll over. I would throw her an imaginary dog treat and she would catch it. In between she would pant happily, her tongue out and waggling. The show really got to be pretty popular with the relatives and, frankly, pretty much anyone who would stand still for it, and we even worked up this bit where I would veeerrry carefully place an imaginary dog treat on her nose, then say, “Staayyy … staayy,” and then I’d snap my fingers and