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“Know what?” I said to Papa. I’d just gotten in trouble for walking in his flats and hoped to make amends by helping to transplant seedlings.

“What’s that, kiddo?” Papa asked in his easy garden voice. My favorite thing in the world was to talk with Papa while helping him in the garden. There was something peaceful about his energy when he was working in the soil, and he spoke directly to me, making me feel like the smartest kid on earth. Even the toughest concepts made sense when Papa explained them because he let me figure them out for myself.

“Plants grow in compost and then turn back into compost when they die,” I said.

“Yup, that’s the magic of Mother Nature.” Papa nodded. “Dead plants turn into new plants.”

I thought about it for a little bit as Papa made dark wet circles with the watering can around the transplants.

“Papa,” I said. “What happens to dogs and people when they die?”

“They turn back into dirt, too,” Papa said. “They get buried in the ground and decompose.”

“So do dead people turn into new people?”

“Nobody knows for sure about reincarnation,” Papa said. “But if you pay attention to Mother Nature, it would make an awful lot of sense.”

Skates’s gardener, Bill, drove her up to visit her new granddaughter. They came from a world where the Paris Peace Accords in January of 1973 had brought an end to left-wing protests over U.S. involvement in Vietnam, while the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade the same month had initiated right-wing anger over legalized abortion. Skates stayed, as usual, at the guesthouse at Carolyn Robinson’s and came over to the farm during the day, bringing store-bought gifts like animal crackers in a colorful box with a red string handle that I coveted so much it made me cry.

“What’s wrong, dear?” Skates asked.

“Skates,” I said between sniffles, eyeing the animal graphics marching around the box, “we don’t eat dead animals.”

I was elated when Mama said not to worry, they weren’t real animals, and I could eat them. “Just this once,” she added, explaining patiently to Skates, “It might not be meat, but we don’t eat processed foods with white flour and white sugar, either. They aren’t good for you.”

I was normally the staunchest follower of these edicts, labeling people who ate meat as “other people,” the kind of people who lived in cities. When asked what I thought about cities, my reply was certain. “Bad,” I said.

“Poor Lissie will probably marry a butcher and move to Manhattan,” Papa joked, realizing our militant stance on diet had created in me a conflicted desire for what I couldn’t have.

“White-throat is back!” Mama wrote on April 19.

The mist settled over the farm, smelling of salt and wood smoke from the cookstove, as crows and seagulls circled and called above the thawing compost heaps. These scents and sounds of spring made my toes and ears tingle as if they were growing as fast as the seedlings on the windowsills. I wanted to take handfuls of earth and put it in my mouth the way Heidi would soon do, leaving a dark mustache around her lips.

Mama was both comforted and alarmed by the speedy growth of both of her offspring. Children made time rush by like a river in spring, swollen with runoff—you’d look back, and a year was gone. The feeling of my four-year-old body when Mama lifted me on her lap seemed suddenly alien to her, so much heavier than only a few weeks earlier. There was a solidity to me now, legs and arms long and skinny, only my child’s belly protruding. Just yesterday, it seemed, I’d been the size of Heidi.

“You have to keep them growing just as fast as they can.” Mama copied this quote from Lester Hazell’s Commonsense Childbirth into her journal. “Plant them when the temperature is right for maximum growth, have the soil fertile, and water them when they need it. A vegetable that stops growing for any reason is in trouble. The same is true of children.”

“Last night I realized how total Heidi’s dependence and helplessness has been when she for the first time ooched over to me to nurse,” Mama added, when Heidi was nearly five months old. “I felt