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“Well, when Helen milked her yesterday, she sent her flying back five feet.”

My dribbles became drops. “Really? Is she all right?”

“Yes, just got a bruise. As long’s you stay close in right here, you’ll be okay. Don’t leave the bucket next to her or she’ll step in it.” He next spread a piece of cloth over the bucket to prevent flies and dirt clots from getting in.

Milking proved the point once again: that the work, while necessary in itself, was an occasion for something else. In fact, focusing too hard on milking was fatal to it. If you became fastidious and thought about the mechanics of the job, the cow would sense you tensing and dry up.

The daily task of rounding up the cow really served as a chance to practice football maneuvers, whistle, or pal up with a next-door neighbor.

The next time the knock came, Amos, the youngest of the Miller clan, was alone at the door, or so it seemed. He began to stammer. “You…might…want to check your garden right away.” Then from behind his back he pulled out a large green bean. “The Blue Lakes are ready. Uh…uh…you probably don’t want to let them get this big. They start to get tough.” Amos handed me the bean.

“Thank you.”

I followed Amos to the garden. Beans were not the only things getting out of hand. So were the redroots, lamb’s-quarters, and fugitive orchard grass. Admittedly there were a few farm chores that took real concentration, such as bean picking and weeding. (Note that cultivating the garden with a horse removed weeds between the rows, mostly not in the rows. The remaining ones had to be hoed by hand.) We tended to do our other tasks first before moving to these. But there was a problem with this default scheduling: the risk that before you finally got around to them, it would rain. Weeds in particular must be hoed on time, whether you have the will to hoe or not. For two weeks, rainfall had interrupted our weeding while making the weeds grow faster.

We stood by the garden and gaped, trying to get a sense of the scope of our predicament. It appeared we had neglected another truism in the economy of life with less technology: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

All of a sudden I looked up and saw Mr. Miller standing across the garden from us. He reached down and pulled up a large weed with a long thick root that resembled a twisted beet. “Are you growing these to eat?” he asked. Before we could answer, he continued, “Do you know what this is?”

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“A redroot?” Mary offered, hesitantly.

“Right, very good. A weed.”

It was possible there was mirth on Mr. Miller’s countenance, but we couldn’t tell from this distance. Either way, the point was made.

But where should we begin? There were beans going to waste too. We decided to save a few beans first, then move on to the weeds.

Beans, alas, took almost as much concentration as weeds, and picking them was our second-least-favorite chore. It was clear when a bean was a baby or a giant, but everything in between seemed shiftier. When you picked a big one, then the next seemed too small, and you’d hesitate—was it? Then later, you’d have worked yourself down to picking a small one and the next seemed too big—but was it? (Once they got big and leathery, beans were best left to hang.) Then you’d realize that some of the small ones you’d rejected for being too big were bigger than some of the big ones you’d rejected for being too small. It was all complicated by the fact that they were partly hidden in the foliage and sometimes resisted the yank. In the end they just swam before us.

When this happened, our minds, awash in the sense of futility, drifted from the scene. Conversational nothings began to pass between us. We began to talk about this and that, a funny thing we remembered, a dream one of us had had the night before, something someone had said. Later—I don’t know how much later—we would find ourselves at the end of a row, our buckets full. The picked