The valley came to us on a Tuesday, which my mother always said was the least dramatic day of the week to arrive anywhere important. She wasn't wrong. The moving truck had a broken tailgate, the neighbor's dog wouldn't stop barking, and the first thing my father said when he stepped out onto our new porch was that the porch needed fixing.

That was his way of saying he loved it.

We planted our first garden the following spring, before we'd properly unpacked. My mother said there was no point in waiting — you couldn't afford to lose a growing season just because your good dishes were still in boxes. This was the logic that governed us: the dishes could wait; the earth could not.

The farm was sixty acres of mostly good land, a farmhouse that smelled of someone else's decades, a barn with a roof that my father assessed as "character," which the insurance man assessed as a liability, and a root cellar that became my domain from the age of nine until I was thirteen and discovered that reading in the root cellar was not, in fact, any more romantic than reading indoors.

Those were the Valley Years — my mother's name for them, said with a particular mixture of exhaustion and devotion that I couldn't translate until I had children of my own, and then translated all at once, with some force, on a Tuesday.

Summer mornings started at five. Not because we were disciplined — we weren't, especially — but because the cows had opinions about schedules and cows are larger than opinions, so their schedule was the schedule. My father was always first up, coffee made by the time the light started, standing at the kitchen window in the way he had of looking at the fields as though they might tell him something if he waited long enough.