“I wish I could remember more,” I said to Magda. “There’s a haze over things.” My father is in the garden, the garden that was far too big and bore many times what the family could eat. I heard my mother say, “I don’t know what to do with all these beans.” “They’ll go to the neighbors,” my father always answered, as if we were back on the prairie where there was rarely enough, where they canned and stored what they had for the long winter when the roads were blocked for weeks, sometimes months on end. I watched him weed with a fast hand around the cornstalks, saw the fields and the horizon behind him. “The garden was the farm,” I said to Magda. “He was doing it again, and doing it right.” I saw him stop weeding and stand up, saw him turn toward the woods, his hands deep in his pockets, and I saw a look of grief cross his face. He didn’t know that I was watching him from the garage, and I couldn’t go to him. We didn’t intrude. Intrusion would mean that I knew, and I couldn’t know that he suffered. “He never left the farm,” I said. “He was always trying to repair and restore and redo.”

The Depression never seemed to end. In addition, there were years of drought, crop failures and dried-up pastures. When rain finally came, only weeds grew. High-velocity southwest winds brought dust from Nebraska and South Dakota and perhaps from as far away as Oklahoma. The sun disappeared for days. Dust, layers of it, covered everything everywhere. The farm animals got sores in their mouths from eating grit-covered grass. People spat black and said things were worse farther west.

Magda was listening as I read the passage to her; her old face had wrinkled into that concentrated look I remembered from the years we had spent together.

“It’s as if I’m looking for something,” I said, “but I don’t know what it is. Something that will release me.”

“From the depression,” she said.

I looked at her.

“And the guilt and the black moods when the sun disappears for days, and from your father who refuses to die.”

I wanted to weep then. I felt the tension in my chest and the pressure in my nose and eyes and the tightening around my mouth, but I had a sense that I wouldn’t stop if I began to cry and closed my eyes to press down the emotion.

“In one of his essays,” Magda said, “Hans Loewald wrote, ‘The work of psychoanalysis can turn ghosts into ancestors.’ ”