I am making a sustained effort to finish the chapter for Jem. Now I begin to wonder whether I have been wrong to concentrate on the exceptional women. In some ways I have come to sense that the ordinary fanner’s wife was the real heroine. But it’s too late to go back now and change the whole point of view. I have chosen to write about those who escaped the grueling chores and extremities of fanning on poor land, to write about those who escaped into an art or into travel as missionaries—all except Sophia, who found her adventure at home. I find myself thinking a great deal about women like Ellen. Of course we forget that just because families were large and villages isolated, there were a great many events that brought people together—some seasonal like sugaring off, apple bees, quilting parties in winter and church suppers in summer, an occasional dance. Weddings and even funerals were social gatherings when hard cider flowed, among the men anyway, and talk flowed too. Villages like this were extraordinarily self-contained—when I think that there was a general store on the green one hundred years ago!

Whatever Jem pulls out of this helter-skelter book of his, he has made every one of us engaged in it look back and do some thinking—and I feel grateful to him.