Ma’iingan came by to look at the snowblower, a 2001 Cub Cadet 926 SWE 8-horse, at noon on an early November Saturday a year ago. The last backyard maple, birch, and popple leaves had fallen overnight. Around 11:45 I brushed a few from the engine with my hardware-store work gloves before starting the machine and testing the controls. After he got there we crunched around in an ankle-deep layer of leaves while discussing the blower’s features and flaws.

I was selling the Cub Cadet for Frasier’s Mom. She and he (a nifty brindle pit-bull-mix with sweet chocolate eyes) lived next-door to us for about five years. They moved to southern Wisconsin last October after an unexpected decision by her landlord. Frasier’s Mom had bought the snowblower new. While showing me how it worked she recalled how the rural sales guy had treated her better — just talked to her like an actual equal human being — than she had been treated by any other man while buying power equipment. She also told a couple stories about hard work she and the machine had done during winters in small cities and tiny towns and out in the sticks. I don’t think she wanted to sell it or leave Duluth. I do know she and Frasier seemed to be having a blast every time they left for and returned from Chester Bowl trail walks.

“Get out of the lake right now, or I will fucking shoot you,” he hollers, staring down an invisible sight and into my eyes, his finger threatening to pull the trigger — a notched branch on the stick rifle he has cocked and rested on his shoulder.

None of us respond, but if heart rates were words, we’d be babbling.

Our silence exasperates him. “I am not fucking kidding. You get out of the lake right now” — he sweeps a dictatorial finger from the lake where seven of us are circled in the water and toward the pebbled beach where he’s tantruming — “… or I will fucking shoot you.”

A few of us turn our backs to him, attempting to pick up the conversation we’d been having before this agitated teen and his friend, high on unaccustomed warmth in the air and whatever’s in that vape pen tucked into that pocket, stumbled into our orbit. The gun-pointer, initially aided by his sidekick, has been yelling at us for five minutes now, a genuinely unnerving bundle of aggression in green shorts. But if there’s one thing this group of grown-ups — parents, partners, queers, professionals, grieving, recovering, regulating, growing — knows how to do, it’s ignore the todderlistic foot stamping of a heckler.