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“We simply prefer to do without such things,” Papa noted.

“Say please and thank you, and don’t hold your fork overhand,” Skates admonished me in reply, trying to tame her grandchildren at the very least, her hair freshly coiffed in perfect white curls for our visit.

“Smile for the picture,” she said when I got it right, wanting to capture our every move, but I was in an antiphoto phase, scowling and turning my head away.

“Bootsie, if you just came to see me more,” Skates said, “I could teach your children some manners.”

To this day I have a fear of incorrectly setting the table, which I would inevitably do at Skates’s house, lacking training in placing the shiny silver knives, spoons, and forks in the correct order around linen napkins, china plates, and crystal glasses. At home all we had were our carved wooden spoons and bowls. Thankfully, I didn’t yet have to attend the dreaded tennis lessons of later summers, when I’d show up at Skates’s private club in my not-white whites and socks pulled uncoolly to my knees, trying to pretend I hit yellow balls with a webbed racket every day of my life at the oldest manicured grass club in the nation.

At Skates’s house everything was, “Careful, fragile!” as Mama always said. There were Skipper’s decorative navy swords on the walls, and wooden, glass, and ceramic birds of all kinds, flying, perching, and calling to our young hands—but, we soon found out, as easily broken as the white sofas and carpets were quickly stained.

My favorite, and also least favorite, things about visiting Skates were the bowls of nuts. They didn’t come in a shell like ones at home that we had to crack open with a metal cracker. Skates’s nuts were ready to eat, from china dishes shaped like fishes and silver bowls with lids and miniature spoons. There were large meaty Brazil nuts, round sweet macadamias that Mama loved, skinless peanuts. My favorites were the salted cashews and sugary pecans, the trick being to chew a pecan and a cashew on each side of the mouth and then mix them together, sweet and salty, on the tongue. When the nut bowls got empty, I knew Skates kept more in the bar, with its rows of sparkly glasses on mirrored shelves and many bottles for mixing grown-up drinks.

“Lissie!” Mama said, finding me deep in the bar cabinet. “No more nuts. They’ll give you bad dreams. Come on, it’s time for bed.”

As I lay in one of the guest rooms all to myself, sick from nuts, I felt giddy with the thrill of the beautiful things at Skates’s house. The downy toilet paper, the Q-tips that Skates said were for cleaning only the outer parts, not the inside, of your ears, the soft white-white towels monogrammed with her initials, the electric orange juicer, the dishwasher and trash compactor, the stationery and pens on her desk printed with her name, Mrs. Eliot W. Coleman.

That night I never wanted to eat another nut again, but the next day I knew I would want more. Tomorrow the nuts would taste good again. Fancy things were like that, too. After a couple days, the allure of Skates’s possessions would wane, but the next time I came back to visit, after a year of not having them, they would be exciting again.

A few weeks after Heidi’s first birthday in January, our neighbors Jean and Keith had their first child, Becca. On the way down the path in the woods to the Nearings’, I’d stop to check and see if she was old enough to play. It was on one of those visits, on a snowy February afternoon, that I found yet another friend. Jean was nursing Becca and Keith was sitting at the table by the front window, cutting up a butternut squash, when we saw a young stranger walking up the path from the Nearings’ in the gray afternoon light.

“Hi, I’m Kent,” the sandy-haired boy said when Keith let him in. “I’m looking for Eliot Coleman.”

We learned that Kent had heard about us from Doc Brainard, a professor at Springfield College, where Kent was a freshman. Kent read Living the Good Life and mentioned to Doc that he wanted to go work for