I loved to ask my father questions. I was curious, but I wonder now if I didn’t also know that he loved to be asked, that he loved the adulation he felt from me when I asked, that the asking was a repetition of what he had loved as a child and had become: the incarnation of the gentle father who listened and answered during milking sessions in the barn. The answer was less important than the question. My father’s answers were often long and involved and I didn’t understand them, but I liked to be near him, liked the smell of him, the feel of his beard. It was hard for him when you grew up. “He has black moods,” Tante Lotte said once to my mother. “You’ll see.”

“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.