In Pennsylvania, the sandstone inns—seeds of villages some of which thrived and expanded while others became a decaying huddle—were spaced every three miles or so, the distance a man could walk in an hour or a team of horses could pull a farm wagon on a summer day without needing to be watered. Farm life still controlled time. Old people dozed in the middle of the day. Neighbors on the street peddled asparagus, beans, and tomatoes grown in their back yards to one another, and Mifflin Avenue, with its high crown that made rainwater rush in the gutters, resounded in the morning to the languid hoofbeats of horses drawing wagons to the farmers’ market a half-mile away, on the far side of the central thoroughfare, the Alton Pike, which had trolley tracks in its center. By the time Owen was born, in 1933, and was brought home for lack of another home to his grandfather’s house in Willow, Roosevelt was newly in office, and the village, named for a huge old tree hard by the inn, its roots watered by the creek that meandered toward Philadelphia, had been incorporated as a borough. It had grown secondary streets parallel to Mifflin Avenue—Second Street, and then Third and Fourth, climbing a hill where children sledded in winter, down the packed snow, bouncing through the barricaded intersections, until the ride ended with a spurt of sparks on a bed of cinders the borough crew had shovelled from a truck. The sparks, the packed snow, the Christmas trees in the front parlors all along the walk to school—these lasted for only a few days, spotted through a drab, damp winter, but made memories that lasted all year and tugged time forward in a child’s virtual eternity.