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“Really?” I felt like asking. It seemed a challenge for Mama to take care of herself that spring. The business of readying the farm for summer overwhelmed her body, which longed to remain in hibernation mode. Checkout times had been more frequent, and fasting was often the culprit, as she resorted to juice diets for energy.

Then Papa found six baby mice when cleaning up the woodshed and brought them out to us in a wood box. I peered in to see a pile of small brown tear shapes with pointy noses and eyes sealed tight as peapods.

“Where’s the mama mouse?” I asked.

“She must have gotten lost or hurt,” Papa said. I held the box against my stomach so I could show Heidi. She looked in, then up at me, that sweet smile of hers flooding her eyes and twisting her mouth into a bow. We gave them goat’s milk and water, but had to push their noses into the milk so they would drink. The first thing I did when I woke the next morning was look in to check on the mice in the box next to our bunk. Some were making cheep-squeak sounds, but two of them did not wake up. We tried to get the others to eat lettuce, oatmeal, and more goat’s milk, but they just crawled to the far corner of the box. The next morning there were no more cheep-squeak noises. I sat next to the box for a while, swallowing at the lump in my throat, then took the dead mice to bury them with the others by the compost heap.

When I found a young bird that had knocked itself out against the front windows, I was afraid it would die like the mice if I helped it, so I left it next to the greenhouse. A little later I snuck out to find the bird still there in the leaves with its eyes closed, as if sitting on a nest. Worried about foxes, I picked it up and carried it inside, a warm shape in the palm of my hand. To my surprise, it began to perk up, and its eyes brightened. When I took it back outside, it flew out of my hand, flopping to the ground at first, then lifting up and alighting on a tree branch. After a while I saw it fly away with some other birds, and over dinner Papa said the fledgling was just stunned and would be just fine, thanks to me for helping it recover.

“Some will die, and some will survive in nature,” he mused.

I may not have known much about wood-paneled station wagons, shag rugs, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Wheel of Fortune, or other high points of 1970s culture, but I was learning to understand the laws of nature. The one thing you could count on was its predictable unpredictability.

“It’s paradise here,” I once overheard a woman say to her friend.

“The very nature of paradise,” the friend replied, “is that it will be lost.”

On an afternoon not long after my sixth birthday, I walked up the soggy path from the bus, the last crusts of snow still hunkering in the dark hollows of the forest, to find the farmhouse empty. Papa was out in the garden spreading compost.

“Where’s Mama?” I asked.

“She went to visit your grandparents,” Papa said.

“Where’s Heidi?”

“Heidi went too.”

“Why did Heidi get to go?”

“Because Heidi is still little, and you are in school.”

I kicked the log along the edge of the path until my shoes filled with damp sawdust. Heidi always got to do everything now that I was in school. My lips started to curl away from my teeth. The cry was there right beneath the surface, waiting for this to happen.

“Don’t cry,” Papa said.

I tried, but I couldn’t stop. I sat down in the sawdust as the tears fell out the corners of my eyes, down my cheeks, and into my open mouth.

“Come on,” Papa said, reaching for my hand. “Let’s go in and get you something to eat.”

“No.” I pushed him away.

He lifted me up and I kicked against his knees, screaming. When he put me down in the house my legs became rubber and I lumped to the floor. I lay on my back and screamed louder. Crying made the anger go away and replaced it with sorrow. Sorrow was gentler.

“Why don’t you lie down for a minute,” Papa said, lifting me to my bunk. There was a calmness to him when he was certain about things. Something had been decided, and it was done. Pretty soon everything