In the mixed farm’s economy there were cash crops harvested once a year—syrup; sheep’s wool; lambs; young roosters; bull calves for the butcher—and all year there was milk for cash and eggs for barter. On the other hand, the vegetable garden provided food directly—without conversion into the decimals of cash, then reconversion into tins—all year long. Kate and Wesley never bought a vegetable. A generation or two earlier, before Sears and the division of labor made the task superfluous, farmers never bought clothes. They grew and made their clothes: out of flax laboriously converted into linen, spun and woven; out of sheep’s wool washed and carded and spun and woven. By my grandparents’ times the farm economy had moved toward the abstractions of finance: Syrup converted into a money order mailed itself to Sears for the cotton that did not grow in New Hampshire; syrup converted came back as overalls, long underwear, nightshirts, blue workshirts, and yards of material for dresses and aprons.

The mixed farm’s economy gradually failed during the long shift from the old cashless farmlife (sometimes called subsistence farming) to the money-economy that the railroad engendered when it provided markets for milk.

My grandfather had his doubts about the cow-economy. Sheep take little work compared to cattle; you don’t milk them and they’ll eat rough forage. Holsteins are finicky; Holsteins prefer millet or clover to good honest hay. Sometimes while I hayed with him my grandfather would speculate: If he were a young man now he’d concentrate on sheep. He described the barn he would build for his sheep, and the fences he would make, and the reservoir he would fashion from concrete on the hill over the house against fire. (He was always frightened of fire.) He was daydreaming that I might follow him at the farm.

When we talked about his year’s work, I was helping my grandfather hay in the summers of the 1940s; briefly he had a companion for his labors. In those summers my grandmother brought me black coffee at six in my bedroom—the same room I write in now, fifty years later—and I set to work, making poems and stories or reading books with the notion of a literary vocation. I took an early break, feeding chickens, while my grandfather milked. At the evening milking, I sat on a three-legged stool in the tie-up while he milked telling me stories and reciting poems. I learned to milk slowly and inefficiently; he always finished my cow, last strokes to strip the udder.

After the morning milking my grandfather’s work was a series of chores on a list he never wrote down: He fed the horse and checked out the vegetable garden, weeding until the sun dried dew off the hay. Then he took his scythe down from the crotch of the dooryard maple, where it hung overnight, and sharpened it with a blue whetstone he carried in the back pocket of his overalls, his hand moving so quickly that it blurred, switching the whetstone at each scrape from one edge of the scythe to the other, an action I duplicated ten times more slowly. Then he set off with Riley on the mowing machine—sitting in the metal scoop of its seat, his scythe mounted over his shoulder—for the field he would cut this morning.