The pigs raised their fleshy noses and snorted as I emptied yogurts onto their heads. The sheep ate fermented tight-packed hay, silage, in a big round cage. They walked to the front of their stable to look at me as we approached. Dark eyes and white muzzles, side-springing ears. I touched the fine down on their cheeks. I’d never touched such gentleness, this wool, these horns, these gold eyes, built out of grass and water. I was used to carnivores like cats and dogs.

Past the sheep we tossed carrots and cabbages, loaves of bread, straw to the cows. The cows were silver with black noses. We climbed into the wide food trough between their rows, and Sara pulled a ladder down from a ceiling hatch and planted it in the tall hay. I followed her feet upward, feeling a cool breeze coming down the ladder. We emerged into a space that was as vast as a cathedral, windy and dark except for slivers of light coming in the loosely constructed walls. “The largest barn of its era in the Appalachians,” said Sara. “A monumental work.”

Hay piled up almost to the ceiling. I felt a long, deep thrill that mounted as I shuffled my feet over the uneven plank floor and fell into the bales to smell their sweetness, to feel their prickles in my hair. Isaac used to say that there are times when things are positive or negative, or times of simple intensity, when those distinctions dissolve. That was how I felt when I first fell in love with him. And here was the feeling again, after a long dormancy. I wanted to run out to the hills and press my face into the soil. I felt I would finally be swept away in the river of a vivid life. As we picked our way across the floor, every new view proved to me how perfect the place was and how right my feelings were. “This is where you’ll be sleeping,” Sara said. “All new arrivals sleep up here, in the hay.”

“How many are there?” I said.

“Haylofts?” said Sara, though I felt she knew what I was asking.

“No,” I said. “New people.”

“Everyone is old at something and new at another,” she said.

I could stay here three days and then take a bus to Richmond. The semester had started yesterday, but maybe it wasn’t too late to enroll.

“You belong here,” Sara said. “I can tell.” The future had been a wall, and now the wall collapsed and I could see the huge range of weathered mountains, and the structures of the farm like the eyes in a face.

I could stay three days, or I could stay the rest of my life.