Page 47, “The Persuasion”
“Then came this.” A wooden lean-to: a platform, a slanted roof, and an open side with a half-moon cut into the roof. “High enough off the ground that no creepie-crawlies can get you if you bring your sleeping bag.” He ran his fingers up my back.
“Next...” He nodded ahead toward a log cabin with two dormers and windows all around. “The foundation was my tenth birthday present from Papa and Babi.
"And then that.” He lifted his chin toward the chicken coop and I remembered a story he’d told in Paris, about how he and Janos had bought the long narrow cabin from a farmer outside Elizabethtown. They’d moved it up to the field, board by board, on one of the flatbeds from the sawmill, and a dozen people from nearby Elizabethtown had joined to raise it.
“And then….” Tonin brought his hands in front of his chest, palm against palm, and bowed to the edifice in the field’s center.
A geodesic dome, the invention of Buckminster Fuller. “T-dome.” Sacred words to him, he bowed again. No right angles, no proper sides, no four walls, just half a globe of invention. A good twenty or so feet across and at least as high, an intricate jigsaw of interlocking steel struts supporting green and yellow wooden triangles, each fit against the three abutting it.
It looked like an upside-down bowl that had captured a very happy thought, an imagination of design that Tonin had begun building when he was only nine.
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