Sylvia’s headed for the warmest corner of the back grounds at Court Green, where the Hugheses have dug and planted their vegetable beds. She’s pushing her four-month-old son’s pram with a bucket banging at her wrist and the end of a watering hose slung over her shoulder, dressed in mud-laced brogues and dungarees, her shirttail trailing beneath her buttoned sweater. She can smell the mineral tang of the turned topsoil as she approaches. The trees defloresce in the distance.

This is her first spring in her first garden, and she feels like a self-made Persephone, driven, not born, into ripeness. She’s baffled by her garden’s easy fecundity—the relentless creep of the weeds and the mint, the spontaneous green emergences—as well as the equal ease of its everyday losses, the casual squanderings of nature. She can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be so free. Since childhood her life has been that of a disciplined conscript, the battles waged mostly in her head. The risks of freedom have always discomfited her, no less than her ardent heart—the heedless vulnerability, the shrieking rush of every thing at once. The threat that she might fail. And yet she has been fighting all these years for her own flowering, brooding over the life she was impatient to get started. Cultivating her words like fragile cuttings, nursing them to root in their windowsill jam jars. Fruitfulness: She yearned for it; she willed it from herself. But she needed it calibrated, poised, meted out with judicious caution, as you would offer crumbs to a wild bird. A decade ago, the surge of her desires nearly killed her. Now, almost thirty, she’s stunned as if from a blow by the thought that she has everything she ever wanted.

She wants to hoard it all, every pink-gummed infant grin, every leaf, every moment watching the clouds knead outside her study. She carries disbelievingly the burden of abundance, the glut of her own good luck: the luminous intensity of days with tiny children, the eroding old manor and its creaky beneficence, the churning vegetable theater outside. And Ted, as breathless as she is with the tag-team passings of babies and householding. Throughout their marriage Ted has talked Sylvia down from the ledge of her anxieties; his body and his voice have been her unfailing succor. His skin fits her better than her own. These days, she’s equally soothed by the solid daily presence of his tools, his fishing gear, his library books on husbandry. Each night she falls into bed, her back and muscles and nipples sore, her fingertips rusty with dirt. She listens for the breathing of her family, the breathing of her aged house. Her heart is like the heart of an elephant: enormous, swollen, her emotions huge. She feels caught in the crush of her own gratitude, clutching all she has.