Each day was a complex of tasks, with milking at the two portals of the day. Kate cared for the hens and harvested the eggs and kept as busy all day into the night as Wesley did. Kate worked on the huge garden also, planting and weeding with Wesley. When it came time for setting poles to raise Kentucky Wonders, Freeman walked down the mountain to help. I forgot to say—

(I forget things; and there are surely chores I never knew of, as I walked in Hamden, Connecticut, to and from Spring Glen Grammar School, melancholy in the suburbs, thinking of my grandparents in New Hampshire, missing the farm)—

I forgot to mention the spring day when the chicks arrived, when Henry Powers’s West Andover post office turned into a cheep-house as cardboard boxes arrived in the mail from the chick factories. Wesley carried cardboard cartons home, boxes singing like a field of crickets, and opened them in the shed. Shipped as eggs, the chicks cracked their shells open on the journey, and always a few whole eggs remained, failures, and maybe one or two stiff little yellow birds lay dead, but mostly each box strutted with fifty or a hundred downy miniature chickens. When they were big enough and the nights were warm, the chicks crossed the road to the chicken yard and the coop where they slept, protected from skunk and fox. When I came to the farm in summer they were my task: I fed them grain and brought them water twice a day. By the end of the summer the females were turning into pullets, though their little eggs had not started, and young roosters went off by truck for slaughter. Pullets became hens in the henhouse, producing eggs that Kate swapped at Henry’s for coffee and salt, or that Kate collected in egg cartons in the toolshed for the Boston eggman to pick up every two weeks, fresh eggs. As the old hens slowed their egg production and took to setting, each took her turn in the kettle. There was a chopping block in the sheepyard near the henhouse with a hatchet stuck into it. Once a year this hatchet divested the lambs of their tails; once in a lifetime each hen, a reward for faithful service, lost her head to hatchet and chopping block. Then my grandmother plucked her feathers and eviscerated her on the porch—cats gathered for portions of hen—and the carcass boiled for hours (these creatures were old, tough, muscled, and gamey) to provide us fricassee. Thus everything fit. More and more it fit into poverty.

These days are short, as I sleep ten or twelve hours. When I feel pain I take pills that make me sleepy. But I recover more mental energy every day, and I need no longer read John Le Carŕe but return to Pepys, Montaigne, Browning, and St. Paul. When I began writing last week, I could manage only a page at a go. Now I can go four pages, visiting again the high pasture of forty years ago.