Community life made more work. There was cooking for others, for the sick or for potluck, for Church or for Grange. There were meetings of the King’s Daughters Sewing Circle, Willing Workers Branch, a devotional program mounted among a dozen women who gathered to sew, each bringing a basket of private work, or cooperating to provide the many hands needed for quilting. Oh, woman’s work was never done, or done only on Sundays when Kate sat hatted and coated by the door an hour before Ansel and Edna took us to Church in the Model A, sitting still with her busy hands calm in her lap—the only time all week that her hands were idle—her eyes faraway and her mouth working, thinking … of what? I come back, always, to the mysterious inner life of Kate Keneston Wells. With Wesley one knew what he thought because he spoke it. Was Kate thinking of the hymns she would play on the organ, an hour hence? Maybe she thought of her daughters to whom she wrote every day but Sunday, penny postcards often, sometimes letters—news of weather, news of how the hens are laying and of the rain that frustrated haying, news of the illness of old neighbors, news of quarts canned, of curtains washed and put back up; advice of the week ahead: Air out the back chamber, pick beans and can them.

This work that was never done was the work of the house, domain or empire of the woman who provided food, shelter, clothing—for her father Ben, for Lucy, Caroline, and Nan, for Wesley, for expanding and contracting crews of itinerant helpers through haying and harvest, logging and sugaring and sheep-shearing. As with the farmer, the farmwife’s daily and yearlong work seldom saw the color of money. Work made food and the clean rooms of health. But as the farmer raised cash by selling sheep’s wool, cordwood, eggs, and syrup; or as the smithy made a wagon once a year—so some farmwives added to family income by running a part-time commercial enterprise. My grandmother in her spare time made and sold hats. For a couple of decades the parlor at the front of the old Cape was the millinery shop. In old photographs of this house you can read a sign lettered over the front door: Millinery. Kate noted that she and her neighbors lacked a hat store, in an era of spectacular hats. She was good with her hands; now she developed an eye for fashion. Once a year she took the train to Boston—to buy new hats and hat material, and to look at the latest fashions. When my mother was big enough she accompanied her mother on these excursions—all morning chugging south, in midday the noise and roil of the metropolis, a late chug back—and remembers best a Woolworth’s with a mile-long counter of penny toys; for a penny you could buy a doll’s hot-water bottle that really held water.

When Kate returned she copied the fashionable hats she bought, making new hats from scratch, and set them on wire hat-pedestals in the parlor. Farmwives tied horses outside the house and came to the parlor to shop for millinery. Some bought new; others brought weary old hats that they left for revivification—a new piece of bright ribbon; a little stitching; a bright new cloth rose; an ostrich feather. From time to time, Kate shut up her store, loading it onto the buggy, and became hat peddler to wives isolated on the backroads in the hills. She drove into their yards with her merchandise, sold what she had and took orders. On these hat-selling excursions she developed the reputation of a demon driver. She stood upright in the front of the carriage, laying reins on the horse’s back to demand celerity, all five foot two of her; her daughter Caroline remembered when a horse stumbled in a rapid trot and Kate steadied him upright by the force of her tidy powerful body.