used to be. If you did not know, you would not know. That is the strange thing. A two-acre lake can disappear so completely that a stranger sees only pasture. The grass is thick now. The spring runs clear. The old stone fence still follows the ridge, quiet and unmoved, doing what it has done for more than a century: marking the place where one responsibility ends and another begins.
Sometimes I rest my boot on the stones the way my grandfather did.
I think about him more as I
