“Well, I don’t know about that,” John had said, and maybe I should’ve taken more notice, because it was true. Turned out, there was nothing poetic about him.

At our wedding, his mother told me no one was quite sure how Robert Frost was connected to them . . . It was more of a rumor than anything that could be fact-checked at the time. Not that it mattered, but it seemed like John had been keeping that from me. Maybe related to Robert Frost is different from being related to Robert Frost. As for the name John, well, it was the most common name in the English-speaking world, wasn’t it? At least no one called him Jack. Jack Frost. Jeez Louise, that would’ve been horrible.

When I finally had a baby, I gave her the most poetic name in the world. Juliet Elizabeth Frost. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl. I only wanted one baby, I’d already decided; I had three sisters and three brothers, and it wasn’t the way they show it in books. I remember reading Cheaper by the Dozen and feeling so cheated. We Johnson kids were no happy gang of seven romping and singing and helping each other, heck no. My oldest brother, fifteen years my senior, barely knew I was alive, and Elaine, older by sixteen months, picked on me endlessly. I was the fifth child, lost in the middle blur. My father never got my name right on the first try, and my mother was exhausted and exasperated all the time. I shared a room with my sisters, and all our clothes were hand-me-downs from our wealthier cousins, first to Nancy, then Elaine, then to me, then to Tina, who at least had the honor of being the baby of the family.

Seven children in nineteen years. Russell, Nancy, Henry, Elaine, me, Arthur and Tina. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t comfortable, either. We didn’t go hungry, but that was because we had a small farm, and Dad could always slaughter a pig. No vacations except for one time when we piled into the gigantic station wagon and drove for ten hours to an aunt’s rented house on a lake, where there was one bathroom for thirteen people. We kids slept on the floors of various rooms and porches, trying to make friends with cousins we had never met. The mosquitoes were relentless, and the lake water was murky and brown. Tina was still wetting the bed at night, which became my responsibility somehow. Every other summer was unbroken, just a stream of long days and hard work, endless laundry and cooking, loading hay, feeding the pigs, weeding our vast garden, crushing grubs between our fingers with no relief from the prairie sun. I hated it.