My twenty-fifth college reunion came at the end of our first year here, after I quit my teaching job. I love reunions. I metagain the old fellows I had drunk beer with at Cronin’s, Master Shallow especially: smooth faces as wrinkled as bark, over pot bellies replacing athletic waists, hair gone or at least its pigment. Most of the classmates I read about in the papers—scientists, professors, writers—stayed away; Harvard’s major products turned up: brokers, bankers, businessmen, and lawyers, alumni who matter to the institution because their charitable wealth keeps the institution rich. My old classmates and I chatted and compared notes; one defiant fellow had become a butcher; others spoke of the pleasures of early retirement. In response to a repeated question I told how I had left the university for the family farm where I wrote for a living. A hundred conversations contained the same exclamation, when I made my habits known: The Class of 1951 collectively cried: “What self-discipline!”

In vain did I protest. For me, I told them, it required no discipline to spend my days writing poems and making books. If I loved chocolate to distraction, I said, would you call me self-disciplined for eating a pound of Hershey’s Kisses before breakfast? The unvarying frequency of the accusation—that I took the whip to myself every day, while handcuffed to the desk; that my Muse was Miss Whippe-Lash of the Soho storefront, “Discipline Inflicted Wearing Gym Costume”—upset me because the stereotype suggested a melancholy provenance: Did all my classmates hate their work so much?

I doubt it. It is conventional to complain about work, and complaining is usually bragging. Our ancestors emigrated to this country, for the most part, to better their material conditions; in the United States it is only acceptable to do something if you claim to do it for money. It is not respectable to work because you love to work.

My grandfather Wesley Wells, son of the blacksmith John, didn’t start out to be a farmer. He had little secondary school; he went briefly to Tilton Academy, about twenty miles away, after his one-room school—maybe for a month?—and came home again. He couldn’t stand being so far from home and family, a trait of character common to his brothers and their children my cousins. The people who stayed home in the countryside—while others left for Massachusetts and Ohio and California, for the cities and the suburbs, for better-paying work—were not merely the feckless ones, the lazy or the stupid. They were the people for whom place and family came before everything else, not as ideas or ethics but as necessities of feeling. Their genes inhabit my cousins who live where they were born.

When Wesley Wells married my grandmother, it was agreed that he farm with his father-in-law. Benjamin Cilley Keneston lacked a son to take over the prosperous farm; the only son was Luther the minister, never sturdy or strong (which must be why he died so young at eighty-eight). As Kate’s husband, Wesley farmed in a son’s place.