“I was curious about how a weight fell from the loft and so I climbed up there to check it out.”

I sighed as we set the bale on the floor and I took the wire cutters from my pocket, snipping the binding and beginning to spread the hay on the floor. “You set up a spot very similar to the way I imagine your grandfather lived when he first came to this farm,” she said. I didn’t look at her, just continued spreading hay.

“I know my grandfather’s story,” I said. I’d heard it a hundred times. Truth be told, I never grew tired of hearing it, but I didn’t say that then because I was embarrassed that she’d found my setup, like I was playing some sort of role or something, trying to pretend I was him. Guillermo Luis Castañeda, an orphan from a small village in Mexico, had come to America when he was only seventeen years old. He’d gotten a job right here on this farm, picking oranges under the sweltering sun. He’d slept in the old stable—that had been brand-new at the time—and learned English, eventually surrounding himself with books on every subject he could get his hands on. He read, and he learned, his mind growing strong, along with his body as he labored picking fruit. When he wasn’t in the orchard, he worked his muscles anyway, lifting coffee cans filled with dirt as he practiced pronouncing the words he read. It came to be that when there was a problem on the farm, people went to Guillermo because he had a wealth of knowledge on everything from the animals, to the machinery, to the quality of the dirt. At first only the other farmhands and laborers sought him out, but then the bosses did, and eventually, even the owner knew his name. Guillermo worked his way up, becoming invaluable to the operation, socking away every cent he earned. He implemented a new water system that saved time and money. He came up with an original method of picking the fruit that cut cost, and he brought in hives of bees and set them up on the hillside because he’d read that they helped sweeten the fruit, and found it was true. He married my grandmother—a local girl—when he was twenty-five, and he bought the farm outright when he was thirty, renaming it Honey Hill Farm, after those bees that set his citrus crop apart from all the others.