The summer I was twelve, our family lived on a farm in central New York. Our borrowed farmhouse days were sandwiched between two stints in town: we’d spent the school year in one side of a turn-of-the-century house with antique furniture, and the coming short winter days would find us–parents and four kids–in a small, spare apartment.

But for now, down a narrow rural road named after the owners of the farm, wildflowers and grass and airy summer blouses rippled in a warm breeze.  We sat on the porch steps, chatting with the grandmotherly proprietor as gentle sunlight slowly baked the land until the wind brought mellow scents of corn and hay.  There was a barn filled with bales to climb on, a cornfield across the street, and quiet woods beyond it.  A sway-backed horse named Susie cropped grass in a field–several decades old now, she was retired. And there was a certain tortoise-shell cat that ended up determining my feelings about the farm.