Why We Work
Silas was born with more cow sense than self-confidence. On his family’s dairy farm outside Kewaskum, Wisconsin, he memorized the rhythms of the morning milking long before he dared look a neighbor in the eye. He thought the world began at the barn door and ended at the county fair, where his older sib’s prize heifers always seemed beyond his skills.
College sounded like something other families did, yet when the U.S. Army recruiter mentioned language school, Silas surprised everyone, himself most of all, by signing the papers. A few months later he was marching at dawn in Monterey, chewing Russian verbs instead of cud. Deciphering and cryptologic puzzles followed in Augsburg, where the cold Bavarian wind carved a firm analytical backbone, that he didn’t know he had. He learned that a farm boy’s stubbornness was a virtue when it met a mission larger than acreage.
After his hitch, the University of Wisconsin beckoned. Silas enrolled in the Applied Securities Analysis Program, a description so non-rural, that it made his parents wonder if he was studying how to polish doorknobs. Numbers, however, felt like good soil: there he had some insight. He met classmates who quoted Keynes instead of corn futures and discovered that friendship can be as simple as sharing black coffee during a marathon discussion of a stock pitch.
Love arrived in earnest. First there was Melissa, who believed every sunrise required a trumpet. Then Teri, whose laughter filled rooms like silage fills a silo: unavoidable. Eventually he married Sally, and together they coaxed four resilient children. Parenthood taught Silas that courage isn’t merely facing gunfire; sometimes it’s braiding hair at 6 a.m. while calculating the bills.
When that marriage ended, Silas feared he’d squandered his last chance at grace. Friends old and new, battle buddies, portfolio pals, a neighbor who had left fresh kolaches on his doorstep, all kept the faith for him until he could shoulder it again. He dated, cautiously, never collecting hearts like trophies, but listening for a melody that matched his own unsteady hymn.
The tune grew clearer with Mary, a yoga-practicing librarian who showed him how silence can hum. With Sofia, a painter, he learned to gaze at life’s negative space and find shape there. Karen, a nurse, though always somewhat distant, taught him the joy of care for others. Each chapter was a lantern on a long and snowy winter night, light enough to take the next step, never so bright it erased the night sky.
Then came Susan, whose kindness felt like the June sun on the hay field. She didn’t try to mend him; she simply welcomed every weathered board of his old un-maintained barn-wood soul. Together they hiked the Wisconsin bluffs and parks, traded biblical quotes and physics articles (yeah, she didn’t read them), and prayed in a language that needed few words. In her presence Silas’s old doubts loosened like last season’s hay, leaving room for gratitude.
Today, when dawn creeps over the fields, Silas breathes and thanks the dairy cows for teaching persistence, the Army for teaching purpose, and every friend and lover for teaching possibility. He is still a farm boy at heart, but now he knows the harvest was never just milk or money. It was spiritual. For the care of others.