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protected and untraumatic life. The one fine good choice I made, if choosing to marry the person one has fallen hopelessly and passionately in love with can be called a choice, was the choice to marry Charlie. Where Charlie and I are concerned, things are wonderfully clear and good. It is only when children get involved—his children, our children—that things become confused.
    Charlie and I were married on a brilliant September day in 1964. He was thirty-six; I was twenty-one. He was a professor and a historian; I was a student. We moved toKansas City, Missouri, where he taught at the university and I finished my BA. We bought a house, so small and quaint it could have been a doll’s house, located in one of the nicest areas of town, within walking distance of the university. We divided those first few idyllic months of our marriage between the university, our city dollhouse, and the farm.
    The farm—we called it that—was not really a farm. No one farmed it, nothing profitable grew on it. It was one hundred acres of rough, rocky Missouri Ozarks land, with small mountains covered with scrub oak and pine and spruce and dogwood and a large open valley sloping down from the mountains to a six-acre pond fed by a rushing stream. We had to drive two hours from Kansas City to get to the farm, and we had to cross a little bridge over the rushing stream to officially enter our property, and so the stream seemed magic, a symbolic entrance, purging us and cleansing us and separating us from anything we did not like.
    There was a house there, built by Charlie’s parents as a vacation home, and the approach to the house was a circle drive around an enormous oak tree. The house itself was not much to look at, but it was easy and comfortable to live in, with a big living room that had a rock fireplace to keep us cozy in winter and a large screened-in porch to protect us from the myriad insects that buzzed through the humid Ozark summers. There were two small bedrooms and a large bed-sofa in the living room, and a tiny but usable bathroom.
    Best of all, the house was really ours. That is, it had never, ever, belonged to Charlie-and-Adelaide. Charlie’s parents had made the farm their permanent home a few years after Charlie and Adelaide married, and because the parents didn’t care much for Adelaide, and because Adelaide didn’t care at all for farms, Charlie and his first wife had spent only three or four nights of their eight years of marriage there. Right after Charlie divorced Adelaide, his father had a stroke and died, and his mother moved back to the small Missouri town she’d grown up in, and the farm became Charlie’s. He had sold off some land to give the profits to an older brother who lived in California and never came to Missouri but felt cheated by Charlie’s having received the farm, and after that everyone was satisfied. I did some wallpapering and redecorating, and made sure that Charlie and I slept in the room that his parents had had, and sold the perfectly good bedsfrom the guest room, which Charlie and Adelaide had slept on, and fixed that room up sort of for Charlie’s girls and sort of for any guest. The house was ours , Charlie’s-and-mine. Adelaide’s ghost was not anywhere about. Caroline and Cathy didn’t remember visiting it.
    The farmland was even more ours, or perhaps, since land never belongs to any one person, but remains solidly, placidly, firmly its own, I should say that the land was even dearer to us. It was rocky, craggy, rough-cut land, the kind that causes you to stumble when you walk. It was populated by rattlesnakes and water moccasins and copperheads, and coyotes and cougars and wolves as well as deer roamed the woods, and although I never saw a live one, a dog once brought me the skeleton, complete with dried canvaslike wings, of an enormous bat, so bats must have lived there, too. The beautiful oak and pine trees mothered poison oak and poison ivy and supported vines as thick and