When my mother died, I inherited eighty acres of Pennsylvania and forty cats. Eighty-two point five acres, to be exact; the cats were beyond precise counting. They seethed in a mewing puddle of fur at the back door, toward five o’clock, when they could hear her inside the kitchen turning the clunky handle of the worn-out can opener that jutted from the doorframe, beside the sweating refrigerator. One Christmas, when she was in her seventies, I had bought her a new can opener, but in time it too went dull and wobbly under its burden of use; I thriftily wondered whether or not it would last her lifetime. In her eighties, she as well was wearing out, as each of my visits to the farmhouse made clear. Walking to the mailbox and feeding the cats were the sole exertions she could still perform—she who had performed so many, from her girlhood of horse-riding and collegiate hockey-playing to the days when, moving her family to this isolated farm, she had led us by working like a man, wielding the chain saw and climbing the extension ladder and swinging herself jubilantly up into the wide tractor seat.

She had been born here, in the age of mule-drawn plows. Neither my father nor I had understood her wish to return to this wearying place of work, weeds, bugs, heat, mud, and wildlife. She had led us in imposing some order—renovating the old stone farmhouse, repairing the barn, planting rows of strawberries and asparagus and peas, mowing a lawn back into the shadow of the woods. But, after I moved away and my father died, the fertile wilderness threatened to reclaim everything. Even the windowsills, the next owner of the house discovered, were rotten and teeming with termites and wood lice. From inside the attic, the shingle roof looked like a starry sky. Not only did my mother allow mice and flying squirrels to nest in the house, she fed them sunflower seeds—whose shells, the new owner discovered, tumbled by the peck from their caches in the woodwork. The house in my mother’s last years smelled of stacked newspapers that never made it to the barn, and of cat-food cans in paper bags, and of damp dog. Her overfed dog, Josie, was going lame along with her mistress; she never got any exercise. It was pathetic, how happy old Josie was to accompany me to the barn with the papers, and out to our mountain of tin in the woods with the loathsome cans.