By the time I remember—1930s and 1940s—the millinery business was done for, outdistanced by catalogs, by itinerant salesmen driving Fords, and by Chevies that took farmwives to the millinery stores of Franklin or Laconia. Traces of the old trade remain throughout this house, especially the wire hat-pedestals that rise like metal crab grass in the black hole upstairs. (I put the first overhead light into this storage place under the eaves.) When I lived with my grandparents, Kate’s direct economic contribution had dwindled to control of the egg concession. Still she worked like my grandfather the sixteen-hour day and the six-day week.

When she was forty-four years old, the United States and the State of New Hampshire, in generous condescension, decided to allow her to vote.

Men and women, in the old farm accommodation, worked equally hard—give or take a farmer’s Grace Livingston Hill—and this equality (I will argue) carried weight, import, and impact. There was no female equality outside work, not in property nor in citizenship. Town meeting took place every March: Ben voted, Wesley voted, but the women stayed home.

Power is not democratic, I need hardly acknowledge, even in a democracy. The house was Kate’s domain of power, whatever the ownership, whatever the name to which the taxbill was addressed. Power came from work. When she was growing up, Kate had another dream of work and domain. Children of the Protestant churches, from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, dreamed the romance of foreign missions—a permissible romance of goodness. (By this time, we understand that missions—these medicines of largesse and martyrdom—were wicked tools of empire and oppression; Kate lacked our wisdom.) As a senior in Franklin High School, she was admitted to Baltimore Women’s Medical College (the female counterpart of Johns Hopkins) to study for her M.D. and become a medical missionary in Africa or China. All other females of her family became schoolteachers (work) before settling down as farmwives (work) but Kate would practice medicine (work) and spread the gospel (work). Then, her mother fell suddenly ill and died. As far as I can tell—or as far as any of her daughters could tell—Kate changed direction without wavering or doubting for a moment. She took over the house for the bereaved widower Ben and, a few years later, added a husband and started a family, undertaking the women’s work that was never done. No one of us—talking with her about her mother and father; about straight A’s in Greek, Latin, mathematics and everything else at Franklin; about admission to medical school (she was still proud of her admission, and of her report card, in her nineties)—ever heard a moment’s regret or self-pity; I don’t think she felt any. I remember Kate’s day—her concentration, her dawn-to-dusk labor—from the time she was in her late fifties until she slowed down toward senility at ninety-two and died mindless at ninety-seven—and I do not believe that she resented her life of work, although some friends of mine who never knew her (or her culture) have argued against my conviction. I think she took mild continual pleasure in completing tasks, in numbering the four hundredth Ball jar of Kentucky Wonders, or in the poundage of clothes wrung out and hung on the line. I see her, or I feel her in my memory, satisfied—by her competence, by her control, by her powerful regency in her domain. She stands astride Eagle Pond Farm like a short, stout Colossus, a rolling pin in one hand and a spatula in the other, with a fierce and purposeful if distracted look in her eye, her body and mind marching to a tune of the day’s work, work, work.