In the many years since they left Ann Arbor for school (I departed when they did), we were never long apart—and now we live near each other again. I am lucky, since most of my friends have children and grandchildren in Sri Lanka or at least north of Seattle. My Michigan children live in New England—my daughter nearby in New Hampshire, my son outside Boston. I get to roll on the floor with grandchildren, and to tell granddaughters how their great-grandmother Lucy made a clothespin doll for her younger sister at Christmas.

Over the bad years of my life between marriages; or in times of fear and panic; or merely in depression, my mind has always sought comfort in remembering the summers of my childhood that I spent in this house with my grandparents. It was a time and place of affection and security—a high pasture of grass and ferns, surrounded by birches, and it remains in my mind the best idyll of my sixty-four years. I have modelled my late life in this house on my grandparents’ as they lived here in work, love, and double-solitude. While I struggle with the beast of my own death, what is more natural than to occupy myself with the tenderness of this recollection?

My grandfather was the model for my adult manhood, more than my father or my father’s father. It pleases and amuses me to compare the way I work to the way Wesley Wells did. Comparisons need distance to be useful, and the work is different enough, farmer and writer, but each of us worked or works the whole day at diverse tasks, making an unpredictable living by producing a variety of products: milk, honey, eggs, wood, chicken-flesh, sheep-flesh, calf-flesh, maple syrup, wood for burning and logs for sawing, ice; poems, essays, children’s books, textbooks, book reviews; essays on New Hampshire, baseball, and poetry; short stories, plays, and an essay-book on work.

In 1902, when Ben Keneston was seventy-six and running the farm with hired help, Wesley married Kate and moved in—to help run the farm. Insofar as Ben acknowledged the possibility of death, he knew that the farm would endure through his daughter and his daughter’s husband. Wesley worked with Ben until Ben’s death in 1914, and he never complained of the arrangement in all the years when he told me stories—but I think that it must have been wretched to work with his father-in-law as boss. One story that my mother tells—to illustrate her grandfather’s spunkiness up to his death—draws the picture. When Ben was dying of old age at eighty-eight, Wesley pulled into the dooryard with hay loaded onto the hayrack and stopped by the kitchen door before urging the horse up hill to the barn. My mother remembers her grandfather Ben charging out of bed, wearing a red flannel nightgown on a warm summer afternoon, to stick his hand into the hay and make sure it was dry enough. Wesley had farmed with him for twelve years; Wesley was thirty-seven years old—and his father-in-law/boss didn’t grant him sense enough to avoid bringing damp hay to the barn; damp hay was known to cause fires.