The dog was maybe brown but more the color of the farm lane it lay in, the gray dust coating its thick hair, coating all of us, too,  me, Dad, the farmer he was talking to: all the same color, texture, pretty much the same stuff as the land for miles around. The tick I found, deep down in the dog’s fur, was gray too, but dog’s skin was pink, and the tick stood up from it like some miniature alien dome. It looked hard and horrid, but swollen and too awful to imagine touching it, much less trying to pull it free, and of course when I did, being a child, just wanting to know, the dog’s head came up and around on its neck snapping, barring very white teeth and growling, a muttering, grumbling sound, like gravel kicked out from under tires peeling out in anger down the farm lane at midnight, and the tummy rub was over.

My mom’s best friends were the Laff ‘n Loaf club. They met at Bertha Hughes’ on a sand road in wheat country near Belle Plaine, Kansas, a bit south of the wheat and peaches country of Haysville, and in case you don’t know where those places are, Cowskin Creek runs between them, but what matters is all of you know my mom and her friends the Laff n’ Loaf Club because they’re in ever photo album from those Ike and Kennedy years. Straight strong women, facing the camera in full skirts, clutching large purses in front of them, at waist level with tight-fisted grips. They were great at laughing and loafing, these women, loved to both, but refrained from doing either too often, because there were peaches to can, beans to snap, wheat to harvest, and mud from Cowskin Creek to scoop off the floors after floods.

And a dog with a tick’s just a dog with a tick. And when the dog growled, and Dad said, “Joe, better leave that dog alone,” that’s what I did. I stood up from the dust, where the dog stayed, stood up into the dusty air where my Dad and his farmer friend stood, laughing, loafing, but not laughing all that much, more just loafing till the guy from town over by the barn got the flat tire on the Allis tractor fixed, and the dog stretched out its legs and beat the dust with its tail, and tick, down deep, and the land all around, swelled full with life.