Sometimes the climate of those memories is almost comical in its blunt honesty. We’d pile into a shed behind the church, or a culvert that kept the rain from turning the ground to soup, and we’d talk about the next thing we’d pull off the land or the next way we’d bend a rule to keep going. We didn’t have a creed so much as a shared suspicion that life shouldn’t be a neat row of boxes with stamps in the right places.