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cows, and most of all, running his old Massey Ferguson across his fields, knowing the furrows he was carving out were the very same ones his own father and grandfather before him had turned over in decades past.
    “They’re long dead now, of course,” he said. “The only things that carry on for sure are the seasons and the crops.”
    Young as I was, hearing him say this moved me. Some part of me admiredthe Plank family’s steadiness and constancy, the order with which their lives unfolded, particularly measured against the untidiness of our own. I loved the idea that a handful of corn seeds, properly planted and tended, would lead to tall, straight stalks, and food. Girls weren’t supposed to care about these things—particularly in those days—but I was never a girl who cared about Barbie dolls or dresses. Even though Val, who loved those things, kept giving them to me.
    I liked to put my hands in the dirt, felt drawn to it. I wished I could drive a tractor. Upstairs, alone in my room, I tried on my brother’s jeans and rolled up the cuffs. I used to say, when people asked me, that I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up. That or a mother, because that was what girls said in those days, even a girl like me, with a mother like mine.
    I told no one this, but the truth was, I dreamed of being a farmer like Edwin Plank.

RUTH
    A Long Line
    F OR ALL THE generations of the family I grew up in—ten of them, by the time I came along—it was having a son to carry on the farm that mattered most, and so, for a Plank, the birth of nothing but daughters, one after the other, had to have been a cruel disappointment on at least one level. But my father never treated the fact of our gender as anything besides a marvel. He spoke of us as “my girls,” and it always seemed, when he did, that he took a particular pride in the fact of having fathered such a brood. If he ever allowed himself to imagine the son he didn’t have, he never let us know.
    But there remained a question nobody spoke of, though we all knew it was there: what would happen to the farm when he was no longer able to tend the land? Who would carry on, after?
    I was never so young that I didn’t know what it meant to be a Plank—that we were marching at the end of a long line dating back a few hundred years with the responsibility to tend our land well and turn it over to the next generation. The people would come and go. It was the farm that endured, and in our family and the world at large, it was believed this was a man’s job.
    Nobody ever doubted that my father loved us all, but it had not been a natural idea for him to share his work with a girl child. With my older sisters, there seemed no interest on their part to know our father’s world of the barn and the fields, but I longed to be with him. Not so much for love of farming, perhaps, as for the love of him. And perhaps because by the time I came along, he’d given up on fathering a son, he acquiesced to my joining him for his morning chores.
    I had to wake before dawn if I wanted to accompany him out to the barn, his workday began so early. Those mornings I’d jump out of bed and pull on my pants and shirt, step into my Keds without even lacing them, and scurry down the stairs just as he set his coffee mug down and headed out the door with our dog, Sadie, close behind. He might greet me, might not. My father inhabited another world when he had milking and crops on his mind.
    I usually trudged a few steps behind him. I had a hard time keeping up, his stride was so long, but it was important to get to the barn when he did, so I could slip in with him. The door, on its heavy iron hinges, was way too heavy for me to open by myself, but he held it open for me, as long as I didn’t lollygag.
    Entering the barn, I’d be hit with the aroma of the manure and the fragrant hay up in the loft, where my father had put up a swing for my sisters and me. Hanging on the wall were the worn leather harnesses and