INTRODUCTION

I am on the road that leads from the little highway to my grandmother's sister's dairy farm. Across the field and running along the line of trees is the path my mother used to walk when she was a girl. The new road is efficient, clean, and straight: it is simpler than the old path, which wiggles – up and down, right and left – along the natural curves of the earth.

The story we tell here is of lives lived like the path, following the lines of circumstance and history, family and community, weather and seasons. It is not a romantic story and we will not change things to make it so. The lives were filled with hard work and worry. It is easy now to look back and count the virtues in this, but my grandmother would not want it that way. She and my granddaddy were not sentimental. They were practical people. They did the work that was in front of them to do.

The story is about a house that my grandfather and his brothers built and that my grandmother and her sister-in-law maintained. It is about working a small plot of land to feed a family in body, mind, and spirit. It is about making every inch, every scrap, every detail of what you have come alive. The story is about how they did it, and it is also a story of the legacy they left to us.

Susan R. Dixon