She pictures Daddy as a little boy, kneeling in this same spot, pressing his hand into the wet concrete, while Trever crowds to be next. The sun and blue sky are above them, and no round barn on top yet, except maybe scaffolding. The bones of the barn. The inside silo is here, though; it was built first, and then the barn around it. The silo would have been a mammoth lonely column, like silos she’s seen after a barn has burned down. But unlike them, not really lonely and abandoned, for there would have been a beehive of building going on around it. There’s a picture in an old album of the silo, half constructed, and you can see all the activity. She’s never been interested in pressing her hand into Trever’s handprint. Her own handprint, and bare footprint, too, are beside Craig’s and Patsy’s and Joan’s, in a foundation in one of the many extensions of the milk house. Maybe her children will someday come and fit their hands and feet into her prints.

Jackie picks up her tablet. She’s been writing an essay for school. Her teacher is new to southern Wisconsin and drove past the round barn one Sunday. Now he wants to know, why did your grandfather build it round? He says he’ll give her extra credit. Back at the Chez Nous she’s completed a composition that explains the advantages of roundness. Daddy gave her some help with names and facts and figures.

That’s really all her teacher has asked for. But Jackie decides to give overflowing measure. She has written how the barn is white, not red like most barns. She has told that it’s divided into the upper barn, the loft, and the lower cowbarn. She described the green shingled roof, starting steep, then making a bend and sloping more gently to the top, which Daddy and Grampa call a “hip roof.” She’s described the two ventilators on opposite sides of the roof, like decorations on a giant’s cap. And then — although she knows the barn as well as the inside of her own mouth, but if someone were to say, “How many teeth do you have?” she’d have to count them with her tongue to be sure — she takes her pencil and tablet and rides her bike from Chez Nous down to the Dairy to take a close look.

She’s recorded the upper barn details, the skylight windows and the windows directly under the eaves, in the hay section; the people-height windows in the other part. Two huge barn doors stretch from floor to eaves and are on a track. When opened, they hang against the outside barn walls. From the foot of the ramp you can look through the open doors and see “The Aims of This Farm” framed shadowy on the silo.

If you walk into the barn from the ramp, ahead of you is a huge open space, all the way to the silo, large enough for a team of horses and a hay wagon. On your right you’ll see an incredible wall of hay, clear up to the roof if haying is just over. It stretches around behind the silo. The part of the loft that isn’t hay and open barn floor has the feed grinder, usually with mounds of oats and unshelled corn beside it, the milking machine motor, and grain rooms with full and empty gunny sacks, and heavy paper sacks full of protein supplement for the pigs. Above the grain rooms are huge grain bins, stretching from silo to wall and almost to the roof; their broad wooden fronts are golden with age.

That is the upper barn. Now Jackie has come down the narrow inner staircase and, after the handprint ritual, is ready to record the cowbarn.

The silo, of course, is the center, with the hay chutes coming down alongside but stopping at the ceiling, letting the hay fall free to the floor. The smaller grain chute, with its paddle to shove in or pull out, hangs over the grain cart. The silage cart stands close to the silage chute, which is also a ventilator shaft. This area close around the silo is where the barn-hands work, feeding the cows, who stand in a wide circle facing them.