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with a village healer named Sibella, and had two children. One of those children lived—my mother’s grandmother—and one didn’t.
    The one who didn’t was a boy they named Paul, and it was his death by drowning that destroyed that family’s faith and sent them packing back to the United States. I was told Paul drowned in shallow water, which for years in my mind conjured an image of choppy Gulf surf near the beach, and a three-year-old child bobbing for moments in waves before he was pulled under for the last time. Eventually my mother told me this wasn’t what she believed happened at all. The family tradition—myth or reality, who knows—is that he died in the bathtub.
    When those missionaries and their daughter returned to the United States, they almost resettled as they had planned in central Massachusetts, but in their attempt to rebuild their lives they decided to start fresh in a new place, and just kept heading north until they were beyond Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in Vermont. In Reddington.
    I think most people my age assume that children died so frequently in the nineteenth century that people didn’t grieve as profoundly or as long as we do today. I don’t believe that. The woman for whom my mother was named was born in 1889, and that woman’s brother in 1891. He died in 1894: There’s one marker for the boy in the Reddington cemetery, another one in that family’s plot in a cemetery in the town of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a third tombstone marking the body’s actual remains in a graveyard in Santiago.
    No one knows who was responsible for bathing Paul when he died. That detail is lost in our family history.
    In any case, when those missionaries who had once had the zeal to move to Mexico to spread God’s word and build a church—literally, help construct the sandstone structure under the searing sun with their pale New England hands—finally settled in Reddington, they rarely set foot in any church, Catholic or Protestant, again.
    My mother was a full-fledged, honest-to-God, no-holds-barred, Liberation News Service, peace-love-and-tie-dye hippie. This was no small accomplishment, since she grew up in a small village in northern Vermont. Villages like Reddington are buffered from cultural change by high mountains, harsh weather, bad television reception, and low population density (which might explain why she never actually tried to escape to places like San Francisco, the East Village, or Woodstock), so it probably took a certain amount of attentiveness, research, and spine to find the revolution—or even a decent peasant skirt.
    Although Sibyl never actually moved into a school bus or commune, the photographs of her taken during the second half of the 1960s show a woman who apparently lived in bell-bottoms and shawls, love beads and medallions and sandals. Those photos reveal a woman with round blue eyes and spiraling dirty blond hair, characteristics I’ve inherited, although my hair is flatter by far than hers ever was.
    She went to Mount Holyoke for two years, but met a slightly older man while waitressing on Cape Cod the summer between her sophomore and junior years and decided to drop out and spend the winter in a cottage with him on the ocean. It didn’t last long. By Thanksgiving she was settled in Jamaica Plain in Boston, helping the Black Panthers start a breakfast program for the poor, while answering telephones for an alternative newspaper. By the spring she had had enough—not because she had grown tired of the movement with a capital M, but because she longed for the country. For Vermont. She wanted to go home, and finally she did.
    She returned just before her twentieth birthday, telling her parents she’d stay through the summer and then resume her studies in the fall. My grandmother always insisted that my mother had dropped out with very good grades, all A’s and B’s, and Mount Holyoke would have been happy to take her back.
    But I don’t think returning to