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“It’s not my birthday,” I said. “My birthday is in October.”

“If anyone knows what day your birthday is, it would be me,” Mama said, her voice sounding like the old Mama. “I gave birth to you right here in this cabin nine years ago.”

“Really?” I said, interested before remembering to deny it. “But not in April, in October.”

“Nope. It was April. The roads were muddy, and the midwife almost couldn’t get through. You slid right out. The umbilical cord was around your neck, but you were sucking your thumb. The midwife cut the cord and said you were a girl. Then Papa put you on my boob, and you started to nurse.”

“Really?” I said again. A story like that was almost too good to deny. “But I’m not a girl.”

“Whatever you say,” Mama said.

When John and I got off the bus on spring afternoons, the sun shone through the leaves of the birch trees below his house to fill our favorite glade with yellow light. Something about the light made me want to run to the rock where you could see the ocean.

“Where are you going?” John called.

I kept on up the path, so he came after me. When we got to the top, we climbed onto the rock and sat, out of breath, looking over the trees to the sea.

“Paul said we should kiss,” John said into the silence.

“No way,” I said, but part of me thought this sounded good.

“Let’s pull our hats down over our mouths,” John said, and we did. We reached out into the space between us and giggled. He pushed his hat face against my hat face, paused for second, and then scrambled off the rock and up the path toward his house. The birch leaves tittered all around.

“Wait,” I called, hat still over my face.

Soon after that John told me he was leaving for good.

“The people we rented to in September left the end of May,” Helen wrote about John’s family in a letter to some friends. “The winter was too much for them, and they weren’t up to the work or the place. They thought homesteading would be a lark, but they did little more than ride their car around and watch TV.”

Sometime after, there was a gathering to determine who should buy the Nearings’ old house. Our former apprentice, Michael, father of my young friend Heather, came up and gave a speech in favor of Stan, another onetime apprentice who would resurrect that old farm to liveliness, despite Helen’s complaints that he was too fun-loving.

Papa returned in May with Skates and Gerry to celebrate Clara’s second birthday and pick up Pumpkin the cow and other items in his new truck. Skates was not one to be easily upset, but she was certainly unsettled after the tragic events of her last visit. And then, when helping Papa chop wood, Skates swung the ax back and slashed Pumpkin’s soft nose. The cow was fine, but Skates would never return to Greenwood Farm.

I suppose that final summer of 1978 was as warm and lovely as all the summers. It was the summer the world’s first test-tube baby was born, and Pope Paul VI died. The long days stretched into warm nights, the flash of fireflies and phosphorescence in June fading into the humid days of July and the honey warmth of August, when everything ripened and fell from the vines. But something was shifting in the world, reflected in the changes all around me. The spirit was gone, moved on—back to the cities. Only the hardy and slow remained.

The farmhouse was dusty and cluttery, but safe, because all of our remaining numbers were accounted for. Clara was napping, and Mama was standing on her head on a folded towel. Her elbows rested on the floor and her hands were clasped behind her neck, hair splayed out in broken wings, as her body rose straight upward in T-shirt and jeans to bare toes pointing at the ceiling. When I tried to do a headstand beside her, it made my head want to split open.

“You must really need your space to stay like that so long,” I said.

Her eyes were upside down, watching, steady and mutinous. She wouldn’t speak to me when she was in a headstand. A headstand was her time.

“Mama,” I said, “I’m hungry.”

Nothing, so I tried a different tactic.

“Mama, are you hungry?” I asked, hoping