It happens this time every year.

On the second day of sun, with the ice pulling back from its winter-long stay on the pavement; the mounds of the red and brown stuff, piled up along the roads, shrinks away; the air warms enough that, even though it’s coat weather, I wear a jacket; and I walk everywhere—everywhere; and the green grass on the fringes of the sidewalks and around the mailboxes looks coffee-brown from the sneakers that carry the junk into it; but it’s showing now, at least the grass is showing, and I know from the sun that it’s coming quickly.

It’s not the spring that I wait for, or worries me. And it’s not the break from academic endeavors—far from it. It’s the jab of metal to belly as I lean over the grill of the pickup, standing on the front bumper, spraying ether into the carburetor and yelling at Poncho or Jaime or Cesar—or whoever the hell is at the wheel—to stomp on the pedal and turn it over one more time. The truck fires, blue-black smoke billows everywhere, and it rattles like marbles in a tin can. We head back to the shop for more pipe to lay out, and maybe even some lunch. That’s what it’s bringing, this second day of sun, and I’m torn and pissed off and elated.

I will be the first member of my family to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. The first—ever. My great-grandfather worked the rail-lines, lost four and a half fingers repairing the elephant-sized steel wheels of the cars. My grandfather died at forty-two of kidney failure. When he died he left my father, then fourteen, and my uncle, twenty-one, a few hundred acres of grain ground and eight thousand dollars of debt. They were chained to that farm—chained to the Ryree bench, and to the west desert of Osgood.

Their binding chain was one of those thirty-foot, rusty snake with inch-thick links and used to jerk a tractor buried frame-deep out of the sludge. But the brothers took the chain, wound it up, looped it, and roped cows until they had enough for their own herd. The brothers took the loop out, swung it wide, and caught land above the Snake River on the Antelope Bench, some of the prettiest in the county. They took that chain and drug it behind them and turned the thin dusty ground until it was night-black. They put a bucket on one end, lowered it deep down until they struck water. When they reeled it up, they turned it over and watered their spuds.

Now, the chain hangs loosely around both their tanned, thick necks. The brothers—my father, my uncle—have earned the right to do what they please. From that dusty sage-brushed land they have raised cash crops of potatoes and barley, herds of Black Angus, homes, and dozens of girls. They raised me, too—the only son, the only namesake—and that’s why the second day of sun scalds my back even though it’s cold enough to see my breath.

They’ll preach that there are two types of smarts: street and school, and that one of those don’t add up to squat. I always questioned why street smarts mattered at all since there were hardly roads in our world—just service trails of wash-boarded gravel. And they question in turn schooling, smarts not worth a fart in a bottle. Instead, they talk of how to rope the sky. I’ll nod as the sun bears down, incinerating me completely, wholly.

This is how it goes—how it has gone—my entire life, on this second day of sun. The chain is light, hardly noticeable, and I agree to farmhand one more summer.

Anyways, I think, the fields are close and I’ve done it forever and I like the guys and the Mexicans with those homemade burritos and dirty jokes. And where else can I get so many hours? Pops and I learned something last year—he’ll let me take a few nights off for dinner-and-a-movie, or a dip in the lake, right? We’re both a little more mature. Maybe we can even make some deals together, look at some type of future together . . .

The second day of sun cinches it up and seals the deal. My decision is made.

But the seventeenth day of sun is a scorcher, and I’m pushing fourteen hours in the tractor with no AC or a radio; then on the thirty-second I’m shoveling barley in a steel grain bin July oven; then on the sixtieth I’m painting garage doors and telephone poles and fences with a three-year-old brush; then on the one-hundredth-and-eighth I’m underneath the silage truck—that rank, shit-caked jalopy—cutting off runners with the torch, and I don’t even own a pair of safety glasses or gloves; and on what seems like the seven-hundredth-ninety-first day I face my father—the man I call Pops on Christmas and when we watch football games together—and I yell and tell him he can take his whole damn farm and cram it in his ass; that I’m never coming back, ever. I leave in my car—tricky bastard won’t even lend me a farm truck—windows down, elbow out, swearing, chipping through gears and dreaming about any city in the wide world with an office close to a sushi bar and an indoor pool.

I box up my work clothes and bury them in the closet of my teenage bedroom and quit, this time for good.

Until a day like today—the second day of sun—and I’m walking to class, two months from being a god-danged college graduate, and I watch my breaths wisping in the cold air and the shrinking snow piles and the flattened grass at the bottom of the mailbox posts.

Without thinking, I get my phone and call my dad and say, “Hey, Pops, I’m gonna have some free weekends here. If you got work, maybe I ought to start coming down.”

My father pauses to mull this about, then says, “Well, we do got that old red horse trailer that needs welded on…”

All through class, I fidget, thinking about my work clothes, how they’ll smell like stale diesel and sweat and will take a day or two to break in. On my walk back to my apartment, the sun scorches my neck. I pop up my jacket’s thin collar, shove hands into pockets, and quicken my step for home.