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“This is silly,” she said between sniffles. “It makes no sense. But I miss my mother.”

“Your mother? But you hardly ever saw her even when we were in Boston.”

“I know. It makes no sense.”

I pondered this strange turn for a few days. At the same time Mary began to grow unaccountably tired. She was losing enthusiasm for gardening. She wanted to sleep in. She also noticed she was late with her period…

Now we were in deep.

At first Mary panicked a little. The Minimites all had close relatives in the immediate vicinity who tutored their young mothers and fathers through the delicate pre- and postnatal changes. We didn’t. That was why morning sickness had triggered homesickness for relatives and old friends. But there was more to it than this. Mary admitted missing going to church. There was no recognizable center of Catholic life in this area, and for all the problems the church was going through, she felt a need to grasp hold of the familiar and the solid.

I panicked a little at Mary’s panic. It was as if she suddenly had drawn a blank on everything we’d learned and experienced here. The fear began to eat at me that she might be unable to last out the eighteen-month commitment. To me, this was unthinkable. To head off a possible disaster, I had an inspiration. I proposed a diversion: to take a little scouting trip to places where we might live once the year-and-a-half stint was over. As we had agreed, of course, that at that time it would be Mary’s turn to pick our home.

Luckily the sorghum was tall and the pumpkin leaves thick, so it was barely necessary to weed them anymore. The canning was done and the rains had abated. My beard had almost filled in. There was hardly anything to do. The quickening had crested, and we were in the midsummer lull. It was the perfect time to get away. I had resolved to use the Escort only if truly necessary, but I thought, given our special conditions and requirements, the time had come.

I took one parting look at the pumpkin patch. With diligent hoeing and regular rain, the vines had all crept together to form an impenetrable green tangle. Were any actual pumpkins growing under all those flopping tendrils? I lifted my leg, thrust it through the leafy canopy, and set it down gingerly, toe first. Repeating this maneuver several times and moving toward the interior of the field, I finally spotted something interesting. What was it? Was the green bulge under the yellow blossom a cucurbit wart, a symptom of some dread disease? I bent closer. No, it seemed too evenly rounded and striped to be pathological. My heartbeat quickened. I took a few more steps, then stubbed my toe on something bigger. It was large, round, and green, with ridges like a huge grenade. I drew back and parted the leaves.

It was six inches, no, eight inches across! After only a month? I gazed at it with the adoration of a father beholding his firstborn child.

The first stage of our search took us east. After further discussions, Mary and I had worked up a short wish list: (1) Close to friends and/or relatives; (2) Church in vicinity; (3) Walk or bike to centers of life; (4) Amish nearby; (5) College (as an employment possibility for someone with a postgraduate degree; I had little desire to join in the race for tenure or prestige, but I didn’t mind the thought of teaching part-time at a quiet liberal arts school). We realized it might be hard to find a place that would fit all the criteria, but meeting some was better than none. The hunt for a nice college town led us to Steubenville, Ohio.

Steubenville was the home of Franciscan University, a small Catholic school lately enjoying a resurgence. Several friends of ours were affiliates of the institution. There was even an Amish settlement not too far away, which we hoped might provide some tie to an agrarian existence. Steubenville seemed to offer a little bit of everything we were looking for.

As soon as we arrived, our hearts sank. The former steel-manufacturing municipality on the upper Ohio River, across from West