She sends her son to shut the gate for me-I should have done that-to keep the sheep from straying into the lower field.

She says that she has been in to see my father at the hospital and that he seems a good deal better today, his fever is down and he ate up his dinner.

“You must be wanting to get back to your own life,” she says, as if that was the most natural thing in the world and exactly what she would be wanting herself in my place. She can’t know anything about my life of sitting in a room writing and going out sometimes to meet a friend or a lover, but if she did know, she would probably say that I have a right to it.

“The boys and I can run up and do what we have to for Aunt Irlma. One of them can stay with her if she doesn’t like to be alone. We can manage for now, anyway. You can phone and see how things develop. You could come up again on the weekend. How about that?”

“Are you sure that would be all right?”

“I don’t think this is so dire,” she says. “The way it usually is, you have to go through quite a few scares before-you know, before it’s curtains. Usually, anyway.”

I think that I can get here in a hurry if I have to, I can always rent a car.

“I can get in to see him every day,” she says. “Him and I are friends, he’ll talk to me. I’ll be sure and let you know anything. Any change or anything.”

And that seems to be the way we’re going to leave it.

I remember something my father once said to me. She restored my faith in women.

Faith in women’s instinct, their natural instinct, something warm and active and straightforward. Something not mine, I had thought, bridling. But now talking to Connie I could see more of what was meant. Though it wasn’t Connie he’d been talking about. It was Irlma.

When I think about all this later, I will recognize that the very corner of the stable where I was standing, to spread the hay, and where the beginning of panic came on me, is the scene of the first clear memory of my life. There is in that corner a flight of steep wooden steps going up to the hayloft, and in the scene I remember I am sitting on the first or second step watching my father milk the black-and-white cow. I know what year it was-the black-and-white cow died of pneumonia in the worst winter of my childhood, which was 1935. Such an expensive loss is not hard to remember.

And since the cow is still alive and I am wearing warm clothes, a woolen coat and leggings, and at milking-time it is already dark-there is a lantern hanging on a nail beside the stall-it is probably the late fall or early winter. Maybe it was still 1934. Just before the brunt of the season hit us.

The lantern hangs on the nail. The black-and-white cow seems remarkably large and definitely marked, at least in comparison with the red cow, or muddy-reddish cow, her survivor, in the next stall. My father sits on the three-legged milking stool, in the cow’s shadow. I can recall the rhythm of the two streams of milk going into the pail, but not quite the sound. Something hard and light, like tiny hailstones? Outside the small area of the stable lit by the lantern are the mangers filled with shaggy hay, the water tank where a kitten of mine will drown some years into the future; the cobwebbed windows, the large brutal tools-scythes and axes and rakes-hanging out of my reach. Outside of that, the dark of the country nights when few cars came down our road and there were no outdoor lights.

And the cold which even then must have been gathering, building into the cold of that extraordinary winter which killed all the chestnut trees, and many orchards.

What Do You Want to Know For?

I saw the crypt before my husband did. It was on the left-hand side, his side of the car, but he was busy driving. We were on a narrow, bumpy road.

“What was that?” I said. “Something strange.”

A large, unnatural mound blanketed with grass.

We turned around as soon as we could find a place, though we hadn’t much time. We were on our way to have lunch with friends who live on Georgian Bay. But we are possessive about this country, and try not to let anything get by us.

There it was, set in the middle of a little country cemetery. Like a big woolly animal-like some giant wombat, lolling around in a prehistoric landscape.

We climbed a bank and unhooked a gate and went to look at the front end of this thing. A stone wall there, between an upper and a lower arch, and a brick wall within the lower arch. No names or dates, nothing but a skinny cross carved roughly into the keystone of the upper arch, as with a stick or a finger. At the other, lower end of the mound, nothing but earth and grass and some big protruding stones, probably set there to hold the earth in place. No markings on them, either-no clues as to who or what might be hidden inside.

We returned to the car.

About a year after this, I had a phone call from the nurse in my doctor’s office. The doctor wanted to see me, an appointment had been made. I knew without asking what this would be about. Three weeks or so before, I had gone to a city clinic for a mammogram. There was no special reason for me to do this, no problem. It is just that I have reached the age when a yearly mammogram is recommended. I had missed last year’s, however, because of too many other things to do.

The results of the mammogram had now been sent to my doctor.

There was a lump deep in my left breast, which neither my doctor nor I had been able to feel. We still could not feel it. My doctor said that it was shown on the mammogram to be about the size of a pea. He had made an appointment for me to see a city doctor who would do a biopsy. As I was leaving he laid his hand on my shoulder. A gesture of concern or reassurance. He is a friend, and I knew that his first wife’s death had begun in just this way.

There were ten days to be put in before I could see the city doctor. I filled the time by answering letters and cleaning up my house and going through my files and having people to dinner. It was a surprise to me that I was busying myself in this way instead of thinking about what you might call deeper matters. I didn’t do any serious reading or listening to music and I didn’t go into a muddled trance as I so often do, looking out the big window in the early morning as the sunlight creeps into the cedars. I didn’t even want to go for walks by myself, though my husband and I went for our usual walks together, or for drives.

I got it into my head that I would like to see the crypt again, and find out something about it. So we set out, sure-or reasonably sure-that we remembered which road it was on. But we did not find it. We took the next road over, and did not find it on that one either. Surely it was in Bruce County, we said, and it was on the north side of an east-west unpaved road, and there were a lot of evergreen trees close by. We spent three or four afternoons looking for it, and were puzzled and disconcerted. But it was a pleasure, as always, to be together in this part of the world looking at the countryside that we think we know so well and that is always springing some sort of surprise on us.

The landscape here is a record of ancient events. It was formed by the advancing, stationary, and retreating ice. The ice has staged its conquests and retreats here several times, withdrawing for the last time about fifteen thousand years ago.

Quite recently, you might say. Quite recently now that I have got used to a certain way of reckoning history.

A glacial landscape such as this is vulnerable. Many of its various contours are made up of gravel, and gravel is easy to get at, easy to scoop out, and always in demand. That’s the material that makes these back roads passable-gravel from the chewed-up hills, the plundered terraces, that have been turned into holes in the land. And it’s a way for farmers to get hold of some cash. One of my earliest memories is of the summer my father sold off the gravel on our river flats, and we had the excitement of the trucks going past all day, as well as the importance of the sign at our gate. Children Playing. That was us. Then when the trucks were gone, the gravel removed, there was the novelty of pits and hollows that held, almost into the summer, the remains of the spring floods. Such hollows will eventually grow clumps of tough flowering weeds, then grass and bushes.