Every morning before sunrise, he backs his truck out of the driveway while the neighborhood still sleeps. The engine hums low, careful not to wake anyone, and the bed of the truck rattles with tools that have been used a thousand times before. He checks his gloves, his helmet, his harness—habits drilled into him by years of climbing poles and fixing power lines where the sky feels close and the ground feels unforgiving.
His daughter watches from the doorway sometimes, wrapped in a blanket too big for her shoulders. She knows what he does, not in technical terms, but in feelings. She knows the long hours. She knows the storms that pull him away in the middle of dinner. She knows that sometimes he comes home exhausted and quiet, carrying the kind of tired that doesn’t leave with sleep.
One afternoon, while he was showering off the grit and sweat of the day, she sat at the kitchen table with cardboard scavenged from an old box and string borrowed from a junk drawer. She worked carefully, tongue tucked between her teeth, cutting shapes that were uneven but earnest. She taped and tied and adjusted, stopping every so often to hold her creation up and imagine it finished. Continue reading…
