Leland in a Pandemic

I met my friend Leland when he was in first grade and he came over to play with my son Henry. For six years now, we’ve been having a yearly conversation about how he’s doing and what he’s thinking about. He just finished his sophomore year at the Central Vermont Career Center in Barre, which is a technical education school. He was never big on regular school, even though he knows more about geography than I’ll ever know. Leland lives in an old farmhouse on a dirt road looking down over Pekin Brook in Calais. I drove over and I sat in my car and he sat in his truck and neither of us had a lot to say, in that way that a lot of us don’t have a lot to say right now, with so much that’s so uncertain...