Wesley worked from sun to sun, but he did stop working: He read the Boston Post, fuming over Republicans and grinning over Ted Williams; on Sundays, and frequently in the evening after supper and shutting up the hens, before Gabriel Heatter with bread and milk at nine o’clock, he sat reading novels—maybe forty-five minutes of the same novel over again: David Harum, or anything by Joe Lincoln, or by Grace Livingston Hill or Kathleen Norris. (He once let me know that high society folks lacked morals.) At Christmas he received one or two of these novels, Sears catalog hardback reprints at sixty-nine cents. He sat in the Morris chair by the light set on the round table, his face working with response, and if the book was a Joe Lincoln, he laughed every ninety seconds.

Kate didn’t read. On Sundays she might read Scripture, and once a week she glanced through the Franklin Transcript that carried local news and obituaries—but this straight-A student from Franklin High School never read a book. She didn’t want to read a book; she had better things to do. Although she was Sabbatarian, her code would have allowed her to read on Sunday, even to read fiction. (My father and I could not play catch with a baseball on a Sunday; we could not play croquet or badminton; we could not listen to baseball games on the radio. My grandfather worked at his animal chores, maybe four hours, because cows were unsabbatarian.) Even on Sunday Kate sat without reading as her mind worked things over; she daydreamed, she planned. She allowed herself a little handwork—making potholders or aprons, crocheting lace for handkerchiefs—providing it was for sale at the Church fair.

On weeknights she sewed or darned while Wesley read, and her work was never done. She darned socks and stitched torn shirts and underwear. If her basket of repair-work was empty, then she knitted mittens for winter, or made socks, or did more fancywork, crocheting and tatting. It kept her hands busy, a form of recreation, and while she worked she kept on thinking; sometimes her lips formed words. Every five or ten minutes she would say something out loud—while my grandfather and I were reading—and we could follow the geography of her thought. “It does seem to rain a lot in Connecticut,” she would say, and I would know that she was remembering a postcard from my mother. (“Mmm,” my grandfather and I would respond in chorus.) “Do you suppose Caroline will teach social studies after all?”—and she was thinking of my aunt who filled in for a friend at a Massachusetts high school.

Kate never kept lists, she just kept moving. At 5:00 A.M., Wesley started the fire in the Glenwood kitchen range, three hundred sixty-five days a year, rumbling a tin can full of kerosene over sticks assembled in the firebox. Maybe Wesley stuck the kettle over the fire, starting the process of Kate’s dripped coffee, strongest in the universe, but thereafter Kate tended the range all day long, even in hot summer—for breakfast and noontime dinner, for pies and canning. (On the hottest days we took our supper cold.) Wesley stacked wood in the woodbox by the stove but Kate split wood herself when she needed a hot fire, and all day she cared for the range’s fire as she once cared for babies, not only in feeding but in adjusting the poise of temperature by louvres and drafts and placement of pots on hot surfaces, exercising without consciousness ten thousand acquired skills.