I long to know more about these human problems.… Luckily Sophia does seem to have one real friend, Bridget, who appears fleetingly but always as a lifter of spirits and a forceful person. She smooths over hurt feelings. It is she who gets them to singing after supper when they gather by the fire to mend or weave, and one grand summer day it is she who leads them all to climb the mountain.

Sophia wrote these letters by candlelight after the household was in bed. She was tired, of course, and I have an idea that what rested her was to contemplate work done, and what she enjoyed most was telling Elisha everything she could about the farm—how many tons of hay got safely stowed away in the barn before a rain; about the foot disease that looked serious for two of the oxen, Star and Barry; about sixty lambs born late one January when the weather was bitter cold, thirty below zero; or, one summer, how raccoons got at the corn and ate a whole row, and when True and two other boys sat up all the next night to watch, they didn’t catch one of the clever creatures. Such news of the farm must have been lifeblood to Elisha.…

I’m half asleep—have been sitting here dreaming for ten minutes. Cornelius is in bed and it is time I was. Only I keep thinking in the back of my mind about a sobering talk I had with Ellen—a talk that has been running under the excitement of the afternoon and Sophia like a small thread of pain. In Sophia’s day, of course, the hard life was the regular thing, shared by everyone. Sophia did not, as Ellen does, see riches and waste and carelessness all around her, so there is now an added psychological hazard to life in the village. It has never been an easy life around here, that’s for sure, but in the old days everyone was, more or less, in the same boat. That is the big difference. Ellen carries the scars of generations of bare subsistence. It shows.

On my way home I looked over at Old Pete’s shack. Smoke was coming out of the chimney, but how can he get through a winter here? He doesn’t even have a proper woodpile from what I could see. “The winter closes in,” as Ellen said. For me, an adventure, but for some, a yearly ordeal. Already I am learning more about the village than I ever dreamed. One real snow has changed the atmosphere.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3