I am here now in Boone’s Mill with Roy and his family and I wanted to write and tell you I am safe and all is well. It is a big farm, 200 acres planted with tobacco and hay. They have pigs and chickens, two horses, and I haven’t counted but somewhere around 20 cats and kittens. They live in a large house of red bricks with white columns, and in the evenings—except on the coldest nights—everyone sits out on the front porch (what we call a verandah) on the porch swing or rocking chairs, watching the sun set over the mountains. The mountains here are like nothing we’ve seen. They’re not big craggy mountains but soft-looking, middle-sized ones which sort of fade and change colours into the horizon, so that every night the sunset is all of these pinks, oranges and blurring shades of blue. I wish that I could paint, it is the sort of thing which a watercolour could show, but as you know I haven’t got an artistic bone in my body.

Everyone wakes at dawn here—just as you are again, I imagine—and before breakfast Mr Jackson (his name is Ron, but I still call him Mr Jackson) is out feeding the pigs, and I help Mrs Jackson (Martha) in the kitchen. There is so much to be done, for they preserve all of the fruits and vegetables from their garden and cure their tobacco and pork and make everything from scratch, each meal feeding not only the four of us and Roy and me but also the four farmhands, silent men whose names I can’t remember yet but who call me ma’am and take off their hats and scrub their dirty hands in the kitchen sink with soap that smells of lye. The food is so different. Every morning for breakfast there are fresh biscuits (which are more like our scones) and homemade berry jam and fried eggs and slabs of pork and brewed coffee. Mrs Jackson says she will teach me to make biscuits soon, but she is always running from one place to the next with flour in her hair and an apron tied on crooked.

Her husband is tall with white hair, big ears and a beard, skinny as a flagpole and just as hard too. I haven’t seen him smile once since I’ve come and he’s always bossing the farmhands and complaining that they don’t work quick enough planting or fertilising or whatever it is they’re doing. I shouldn’t be too judgmental though. I know farming is not an easy life.