A harvest of memories

Reported in Chickasaw County, Iowa

Verna Orvis wasn’t sure why the stitches on the wedding dress had come undone, but no matter, because she knew how to mend a rended garment, even one as old and delicate as this. She would pull the bundle of satin and lace from the plastic dust cover. She would flip the switch on one of the five sewing machines strewn across her dining room. Then she would feed the bridal gown her mother had worn nearly 70 years ago into the needle well.

She just needed to find an idle moment to inspect the ripped sleeve one more time. Had it been pleated or bunched?

“We’re going to get that done,” Verna said to herself, walking past the dress and into the kitchen. “One of these days.”

CNN played on a small TV as she began cooking dinner. “More Biden s---,” her husband, Jack, would sometimes call Verna’s news shows, which ran in the background as she did housework.

At 61 years old, Verna played many roles in Lawler, the small farm town in northeast Iowa where she lived — emergency seamstress, unofficial photographer, church organizer, mother of three grown daughters and, of course, wife of Jack. A lifelong instinct for record-keeping had served her well at the local company where she helped farmers navigate the byzantine world of crop insurance, which she had done since she was 19.

Now, as corn stalks dried and summer slid into the autumn of 2023, one project loomed above the rest: In four days, Verna was hosting a large family reunion at the same local ballroom where her parents had their wedding reception all those decades before. The reunion would fall on her parents’ anniversary, to the day, and Verna had carefully studied a photo from the occasion. Her mother’s dress would be on display alongside other family heirlooms.

Verna believed the past was something to be honored, even revered. Her remarkable memory made her a walking archive of the history of Lawler, population 400, including the surrounding farm settlements that were founded in the 19th century by waves of European migrants that included her own family. She was particularly moved by stories of rural families helping one another amid hardship.

But increasingly, Verna saw things differently from most of her longtime neighbors in Chickasaw County, which had experienced one of the most dramatic political pivots in the country. The transformation had been swift. In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won 60 percent of voters in this onetime Democratic stronghold; by 2016, Donald Trump won 58 percent of voters and then 65 percent in 2020. The political era that followed was one of grievance, and tribalism, and suspicion, and rage.

Rage wasn’t Verna’s style. She believed in decency. She believed in nurturing community, not sowing division. Her life was animated by gentler questions than the ones at the heart of national politics in 2023: What do people owe one another? When can the past teach us something about ourselves, and when does it blind us to the present?

Verna was mystified by Trump’s appeal among people she had known her whole life.

She mostly kept her political thoughts to herself.

Jack sometimes tested her resolve. He was a dedicated Trump supporter, although he had never been very political before 2016. Now, he and Verna sometimes argued about the latest furies spreading through the MAGA digital ecosystem, which he followed on quick spurts delivered to his phone through social media algorithms. In Trump, Jack, 61, saw a fighter who spoke plainly about what was wrong with America without grasping for excuses in the fine print.

In her kitchen now, as grave intonations about the state of democracy spilled from the mouths of people on CNN and into the Orvis home, Verna trained her attention to the state of dinner. Politics for most people unfolded against the quiet moments of daily life, not the other way around — even in rural northeast Iowa on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, where the first GOP nominating contest would be held in January.

She occasionally consulted a cookbook of old family recipes, which she had assembled and distributed as a bridal gift for her youngest daughter, because Verna believed even a recipe was a kind of history worth preserving. On a counter nearby was a pile of photo albums.

Two pounds of ground beef.

A few sprinkles of garlic powder.

Two cans of Campbell’s soup, cheddar cheese and cream of golden mushroom.

Then the final layer of frozen crinkle-cut potatoes, which gave the dish its name: French fry casserole.

Jack walked in, wearing a gentle smile eased by several cans of Busch Light. He took his place at the edge of the kitchen counter, and Verna fixed him a plate, which Jack seasoned with several heaps of ketchup. “MCCARTHY OUSTER JEOPARDIZES U.S. AID FOR UKRAINE,” read the headline on the television, which Jack would soon change to reruns of “Gunsmoke.”

“So I see they got rid of the speaker of the House today, or whatever that was all about,” Jack said.

“Yesterday,” Verna said. “He’s out the door.”

“So Trump’s gonna take it and then they’ll impeach Biden and impeach Kamala and then there will be a president I like?” Jack asked.

“You’re in a dream world. That ain’t gonna happen,” Verna said.

“You’re the only Democrat in this county,” Jack told her, still smiling but needling.

“No,” she said, sounding annoyed now.

“Yeah,” he told her.

“Well then, I’ll take your word for it,” Verna said.

A few moments passed and they looked away from each other.

Verna looked down at Jack’s empty plate and fixed him seconds.

* * *

One thing that hadn’t changed here in Chickasaw County was the pull of the harvest season — and that was what most people in rural Iowa were focused on now. Corn and beans.

The first light in the Orvis home flickered on just after 4 a.m. The roads were still pitch-black when Jack left for work each day and would be dark again by the time he returned. Verna woke up early to see him off. She loaded up his lunchbox and handed him his water jug and watched him drive away.

Jack was always in motion this time of year; he and Verna hardly saw each other. Starting early in the morning, seven days a week, Jack managed grain processing for a large hog operation. Then, in the early evenings, he tended to the corn crop on the 140-acre family farm he had inherited from a great uncle, which he cultivated alongside his brother, Tim. Jack was also the sole remaining volunteer first-responder in Lawler, which meant he could be called away at any moment to provide medical assistance before faraway rural ambulances could arrive.

This year the harvest carried particular angst.

Farmers across Iowa were jittery about their yields because of a prolonged summer drought. Agricultural margins were always tight for small operations, and the Orvis family had put in an order for an expensive new piece of farm machinery. Jack was worried that their crop would be smaller than usual.

At the insurance company, Verna took calls from nervous farmers. Some families’ crop yields were coming up short and they might need to file claims to make up some of their losses. Although they might be land-rich on paper because of the booming price per acre, each season the threat of financial calamity loomed over family farm owners with small cash reserves. Behind every successful farmer, the saying went, was a wife with a job in town — and with employer-sponsored health coverage.

“You’re all done with your beans? And where are you with your corn? What was your yield?” Verna asked one farmer. “You’re going to be right on the edge of a claim situation. I know that’s frustrating.”

Verna’s co-worker, Zach, walked by and settled into his office. They diligently avoided talking about politics, and often avoided talking altogether. She had been exasperated when Zach told her he was in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the Capitol Building. He had stood outside, he said, praying the rosary with a group of men while the violence unfolded. She bristled whenever he mentioned Trump or assured her the 2020 election had been stolen.

But what good was it to get so worked up?

She could fight, or she could get along.

Instead, Verna asked about Zach’s wife, who was expecting a baby — their sixth.

“Good luck,” she told him as he left for an appointment.

Difficult births ran in Verna’s family. She knew the special hell they wrought.

Verna’s middle daughter, Amanda, stopped breathing overnight shortly after being delivered in 1988 and was flown to Iowa City to receive more sophisticated medical care. She had a congenital heart defect.

There had been a drought that year, too, and although whole fields of crop failed, Amanda had lived.

“Things are going to work out,” Verna often thought when faced with tragedies.

In 2012, when Amanda was grown and starting her own family, her unborn baby girl was diagnosed in utero with a hole in her heart.

Doctors were relieved when the hole closed on its own, but then the baby’s infant lungs collapsed soon after the birth.

On the first night of her life, the baby underwent surgery and went on life support. There was virtually no chance of survival. Verna had never seen an infant so sick.

Amanda named the child Amelia.

* * *

It was her lunch break now, so Verna drove to the closest supermarket in a neighboring town. She was going to bake pies for the family reunion, including a chocolate pie, her mother’s specialty.

As she drove, Verna passed farms littered with semitrucks and grain carts and combine harvesters worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and she thought about how much things had changed since she was a girl. When her father first started farming, he had done so with horses and his own strength and family help. Verna and her siblings could still vividly recall pitching stall-manure by hand on their farm as kids; they would clean out the hog pit, fork it out to the field and spread it for fertilizer.

There were machines for all of it now — but fewer real family farms than ever, a trend that accelerated in the 1980s during the farm bankruptcy crisis. For some, that period undermined the belief that hard work was enough to succeed in America, the optimism that had brought many families to the Midwest to begin with.

Verna’s family first settled in Iowa in the mid-to-late 1800s, part of a wave of migration facilitated by the earlier mass genocide and displacement of Native people across the continent, including the Chickasaw tribe, after which the county was named. Each swell of migrants — German, Norwegian, Irish, Czech — settled in its own town. Verna’s parents, like many of their generation, spoke German at home, and her father was educated in a one-room schoolhouse where a wood stove was used to beat back the cold Iowa winters. Surviving back then was a community effort, and community was defined in part by where you were originally from, not just by where you had landed. Verna’s parents were buried a stone’s throw from the plot of land where her father had grown up.

These days, a new wave of Hispanic migrants was arriving in Iowa to fill tens of thousands of vacant jobs across the state. Many were seasonal guest workers courted from foreign countries by employers eager for their labor. But some were longtime residents choosing to stay in Iowa to raise families; regardless of their own immigration status, they had American-born children who were citizens of the United States. These mixed-status families, which had appeared in greater numbers in Chickasaw County in recent years, made some people bristle.

Across Iowa, Republican presidential candidates were riling up voters with calls to militarize the United States border with Mexico to stop illegal immigration and the international drug trade. This had been a rousing talking point of the modern Republican Party that had attracted many onetime Democrats to conservative politics. Trump’s improbable presidential victory in 2016 had begun with the warning that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Verna struggled to understand how so many people she had known for decades could be swept up in a movement she saw as rooted in self-interest and exclusion. She saw Trump as a con man whose biggest scam had been to convince good, hard-working people that he related to their lives and struggles. She thought his very demeanor encouraged people to perform anger about topics they did not fully understand.

As Verna continued driving, now through farmland covered in drying corn crop, she passed solar panels, farm equipment and ethanol plants, all made possible by some combination of government grants, tax deductions, and subsidies. Sometimes she heard complaints about low-income families supposedly abusing safety-net programs like Medicaid. Verna wished her neighbors acknowledged what the government did for them, too. She thought about how the county wouldn’t even have an ambulance service if not for the now-maligned coronavirus relief funding. Nobody seemed to be making that case to voters here.

“Don’t just point to programs helping other people and say cut those,” Verna wanted to tell conservative friends, though instead sometimes she just let the moment pass.

The wind was blowing wildly by the time Verna pulled into the grocery store.

Her list included five pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, a pound of dark baker’s chocolate, and several cans of cherry and pumpkin pie filling.

Inside, she ran into Jack’s brother, Tim. He walked with two braces on each leg and a cane in each hand.

“You gonna pick again tomorrow?” Verna asked.

“As dry as it is out there now, the stalks might be too wet tomorrow,” he said. “There’s rain coming.”

Verna knew he’d try to pick corn anyway.

* * *

Growing up, Verna’s mother kept an old treadle sewing machine in her bedroom, and Verna would watch from the foot of the bed as she made the family’s clothes. Verna was sitting at her own sewing machine now, which was perched on the dining table, taking in this memory when her cellphone rang. It was Jack calling from work. He wasn’t much of a talker but he always checked in at this time of day.

“What’s going on?” Jack asked.

“I’m sewing the seams shut on my mother’s wedding dress. What’s happening today?” Verna said. “Did you eat your lunch already?”

“Yep,” Jack said.

“Okay, just checking,” Verna said.

Jack and Verna’s wedding album sat nearby as she began to sew again. It had rained that hot August day in 1982, which was good for the crops. Verna marveled at how young they once were. She had started college before they were married but returned to Chickasaw County just a few days into her studies to help her dad on the farm and to be with Jack; after they married they moved into a little trailer out in the country. “Everyone should live in a trailer house once,” Jack joked, “because you don’t want to live in one twice.”

Two of Verna’s sisters walked into the house as she worked on the dress. They were here to help her bake desserts for the reunion: lemon jelly rolls, monster bars, chocolate pie. Every recipe a memory. They sat beneath a framed print of a painting called “Harvest of Blessings,” depicting an idyllic corn farm.

“How’s the yield going?” asked one sister, Doris.

“Considering it didn’t rain for five weeks,” Verna said, trailing off. “There’s people I know who are going to be 40 bushels an acre. Ours will be about 50-some.”

Verna pulled the wedding dress out from under the machine and inspected it once more.

“The one side has more fabric than the other, and I’m like, what the heck,” Verna told another sister, Madonna.

“So now what?” Madonna asked.

There had been little clues in the fabric that Verna didn’t understand before, but she saw it all clearly now: the sleeve had been pleated, not bunched. She needed to rip out the gathering string she had sewn in to get it back to its original shape. Studying an artifact, understanding its context, sitting with how it was and how it could be. This was a more tangible kind of remembering than nostalgia alone. It took work — and perspective.

“It looks kind of cool the way it is, but I want it to be like it was,” Verna said. “It’s okay. I’ve ripped out so much stuff in my life it’s not even funny.”

Soon, the women began to bake the pies and Madonna asked about Verna’s granddaughter whose lungs had collapsed shortly after birth.

The little girl had lived.

She was a miracle.

Now 11 years old, Amelia was vibrant, funny and unbothered by the oxygen machine she carried in her backpack, which allowed her to live a mostly normal childhood. Friends and neighbors had donated money to keep her family afloat. Jack and Verna had encouraged them to move into the old farmhouse on the Orvis farm. Her survival was a matter of intense pride.

“We have pie dough!” Doris announced. “Do you have any pie dishes?”

Verna dug through a cabinet and laid out a few options.

“Are some of those Mom’s?” Madonna asked.

“Oh. Ohhh. Yeah, let’s use those,” Doris said reverently.

The past was always echoing through the present, Verna knew, and each person got to decide what it all meant, and to decide again, and again. A harvest of memories, just as much part of the landscape as the corn, to those who paid attention.

* * *

As the sisters finished baking the pies, Jack left his day job at the pork producer and began the short drive down the gravel roads he had known since boyhood toward the Orvis farm. He had a Busch Light in hand and another waiting in his pocket. The sun had already set. The season and the landscape and the beer made him wistful.

He passed the farm where he grew up, which his parents lost in 1986. The farms back then were small and there used to be fences everywhere. Now, there weren’t any fences in sight because land ownership had been so thoroughly consolidated by big corporations that dividing lots wasn’t necessary. The community had changed, too. It used to be that when he went into town he knew everyone, but now he wasn’t sure he knew even half of the people walking around. People left in search of work or love or trouble. At work now, some of the newcomers only spoke Spanish.

Lately, Jack had taken to wondering aloud how many more harvests he had in him before retirement. The 18-hour days became harder each year. But then even the word “retirement” prompted a laugh.

Resilience was central to the story of Jack’s family, to Jack’s sense of self, and he saw evidence of it throughout the landscape now.

On his way to and from town, Jack drove past the 50-foot grain silo where his brother, Tim, nearly died three decades prior at just 19 years old. Tim had climbed up the side of the silo to begin unloading fermented cattle feed. The ground was wet and muddy. Up and down he went, several times, and on his sixth or seventh climb of the day, he slipped. His body crashed down the silo chute and straight into the earth.

It was a miracle Tim lived at all, but his doctors concluded that there was virtually no possibility that he would ever walk again.

Then, one day, he felt a sensation in his foot.

Now, Tim walked with a cane in each hand. And although he could no longer climb the six-foot ladder onto the combine harvester, Tim, 53, had found a way to continue farming anyway — after he finished at his day job, he’d return to the farm, and use a mechanized lift to hoist himself up onto the machinery.

The two brothers farmed together, and although they bickered, Jack carried a burning admiration for his brother. He found great inspiration in his will to live and to work. “He’s one of them guys that could have said screw it and sat at home waiting for the check,” Jack told people. “Never did it. Ever.”

As Jack continued driving, he thought about his granddaughter, Amelia, who had shown a remarkable will to survive despite so much medical hardship.

He thought back to when his daughter Amanda stopped breathing shortly after she was born. Now she was a nurse and wife and mother.

He thought suddenly about the story he was told as a boy, about being baptized at the hospital when he was born, because the doctors didn’t expect him to survive his first few days either.

“Three generations that weren’t supposed to make it,” he said to himself as he drove down these gravel roads where his worldview had taken shape.

Now he was driving up alongside the Orvis farm.

All Jack had ever wanted to be was a farmer, and he had been fortunate to inherit this acreage from his great uncle in 1995. He found great pride in the history of the old farmhouse that preceded the one where Amanda and her husband and their daughter Amelia now lived. During the Great Depression, it had been a home where destitute people could show up and get a good meal.

He had found his own way to tend to the community, too. In 1990, the year of Tim’s accident, Jack began volunteering with EMS in addition to his volunteer role at the local fire department.

Living in a rural area, he often knew the people who needed help. Sometimes the calls were poignant, even funny, like the old woman who lived alone and would push her Life Alert button to ask Jack to bring her a six-pack of beer. Sometimes what he had to do could be awful. One time, after a fire, he had to scoop up the burned remains of an old woman he knew. Even as other people had left the volunteer corps, Jack persisted out of a sense of duty. This was something he could do for other people, and he continued to do it simply because it was right.

“I’ve learned one thing doing this over 30 years,” he told people who asked about it. “If you’re scared and something is happening to you, and you see someone you know, that helps more than a stranger coming up.”

Doing that work, Jack came to believe there were too many government regulations and not enough government support. It used to be that neighbors would call him directly for help with small medical hiccups; now, he could only respond to a scene if an ambulance had been dispatched first. He felt the rules were made by people in cities, but rural services often functioned on truly threadbare budgets. And yet, despite regulations, EMS was not classified as an essential government service in Iowa, which meant no guaranteed tax funding and, sometimes, no ambulances at all.

That gap between emergency regulations and emergency service funding summarized what Jack believed had become the story of modern America: rules that didn’t make sense, imposed by people who lived far away. He bristled at the continued education requirements put on volunteer first-responders. He suspected that was why there used to be eight or nine first-responders in the area but now he was the last one.

In Trump, Jack saw someone who was at least willing to call out stupid rules. Maybe it was more style than anything. At that moment, Trump was about 50 miles south, in Waterloo, speaking at a rally of die-hard supporters. Jack was too busy to attend but would hear about it the next day from co-workers and on social media.

Jack had little regard for Biden and often said that Vice President Harris was incompetent.

“He’s worthless, and she’s worse,” he would say.

Verna agreed with Jack that Biden was perhaps too old to seek reelection, but she said his attitude toward Harris was rooted in sexism.

If Verna were less easygoing, Jack felt, they might have gotten divorced long ago.

Verna let a lot of things go for the sake of keeping the peace; and Jack knew the power of the silent treatment when they did fight.

On the farm, now, there was no more corn in the field. Tim had finished picking a few hours earlier despite the rain.

Jack mounted a tractor and pulled a long auger used to convey the corn off one of the grain bins.

He climbed a 25-foot bin and opened a hatch at the top, and spent some time looking deep inside before snapping it shut. Once the corn finished drying, he’d know the yield, which was a measure of what he had been able to grow with what he had. It would be compared with every other farmer in the region wherever and whenever people gathered.

* * *

On the final stretch of road into town, Jack passed a little house occupied by Mexican farmworkers where he had been called in February for a medical emergency.

When Jack walked in the door that day, he’d heard the family speaking Spanish.

“Is that guero with the ambulance?” someone asked, though Jack couldn’t understand. An English-speaking boy interpreted between Jack, the 911 dispatcher and a woman who was screaming in pain.

The woman was in labor.

The baby was only about 24 weeks along.

Soon, Jack was holding the infant close as it struggled to breathe, still connected to the mother by the umbilical cord amid the ongoing chaos of afterbirth. He cleared the baby girl’s nasal passages and he tried to stay calm.

When the ambulance arrived, there were only two paramedics; Jack drove the rig to the hospital so they could ride in the back with the mother and child.

“Normally, I’m at the end of the drive, and it was kind of nice to be at the beginning,” he told people afterward.

He did not know that several members of the family had entered the United States illegally.

He did not know about their long journey to attain legal status.

He did not know that the baby’s grandmother, who was crouched down to help deliver the baby when Jack walked in, had survived an accident with a semitruck just months before — nor that her exposed intestines were being held inside her stomach by a girdle until a surgeon could sew her stomach shut. Never mind the tens of thousands of dollars of medical debt she and her family had no idea how to pay back.

He didn’t know any of that, and he hadn’t kept in touch with the family, and they didn’t frequent the same places, aside from the local gas station. But he found intense joy in having been able to help them that day. “They want the same things we all want,” he concluded when asked about them. “They’ve got their bad people and good people just like we do.”

And now Jack’s drive was done and he was home.

He kicked off his heavy coat and work boots, then skirted past his in-laws with few words and washed up for dinner.

“So did you guys get done up there?” Verna asked. “Any idea what it’s yielding?”

* * *

On the day of the reunion, Verna was arranging a display of family relics when she paused suddenly to flip through her mother’s old recipe book.

“She learned to type by typing up these recipes,” she told her youngest daughter, Rachel. “We checked out a book from the public library, an old manual, about how to type and that’s how she taught herself.”

At the front of the ballroom, her mother’s wedding dress hung on a mannequin as dozens of family members from across the Midwest filtered in. Twenty-five folding tables were laid with cream-colored tablecloths. String lights and harvest-themed ornaments were set throughout the ballroom.

Verna had a plan.

Rachel would put on the dress so they could reenact the photo from her parents’ wedding.

Verna had learned how to be a wife by watching her mother do it. She knew that her own marriage might seem old fashioned to some, and perhaps even at odds with her political beliefs. She had made a vow 41 years ago to care for her husband. Just because times had changed, and they had changed, didn’t mean their agreements or commitments to each other had.

As people ate, a few in-laws shared their political views furtively.

“Trump is completely losing it,” one said, “all these trials are costing him millions.”

“And yet it’s half of America. Well, half of the voters,” another said.

“He was here in Waterloo and it was all ‘Make America Great Again’ this and that,” another added. “What did he even do?”

Nearby, Verna gingerly lifted the veil off the mannequin and handed the dress to Rachel, who disappeared into the back of the ballroom to change and emerged moments later. Her hair was draped over the front of her shoulders against the lace collar.

“We’re going to reenact the picture now,” Verna said into a microphone. “We have some participants that were dragged into this, and I want to thank them for fitting into these really tight dresses. Those people worked themselves to the bone back then.”

Verna, beaming, gave instructions over the speaker system for the mock bridal entourage to walk in, starting with Amelia, accessorized with the oversize backpack that held her oxygen machine. Soon, Rachel and her husband began the short walk into the ballroom. Verna juggled the microphone and the camera while snapping photos.

“It happened right there, 70 years ago tonight,” Verna said. “All right, 1, 2, 3!”

Never once dropping her smile, Rachel turned a sharp 180 degrees as soon as Verna excused them. Only then did her face betray the slightest discomfort at the nostalgic pageant. She walked briskly out of the ballroom to change out of the past and into her own clothes.

* * *

After all the worry, the grain bin was full. Too full. Now Jack needed to offload some of the corn to sell it to a local wholesaler — but a motor on the auger had broken, and he worried more rain might be coming.

“Just do it tomorrow. Nothing’s going to happen,” Tim told him.

“Oh, you care less about my corn than your corn?” Jack asked.

“We can close the lid if you want to,” Tim offered.

Tim was savoring the end of the harvest. Another season closing and he had been able to work all of it.

When Tim told the story of his fall, he focused on his nurses and the surgeons and the family that guided his recovery. Tim — who called himself “a Republican, I guess” — praised the social service organizations that had helped him find and pay for the lift he now used to mount the farming machinery. To him, the story of his fall was also about all the help he got along the way.

Jack tinkered with the motor with a flashlight in his mouth.

Tim watched from the truck, doubtful, as his twin sons fetched tools for their uncle and took over the lighting.

Then, to everyone’s surprise — except perhaps Jack’s — the machine whirred to life.

Jack climbed into Tim’s truck and cracked open a beer. Tim’s boys finished loading corn into a carriage and tarped it. Without asking any questions, they knew exactly what to do and how to do it.

“I’m a good teacher,” Jack said.

“I’m the one that taught them how to do it the right way,” Tim said.

* * *

Back at home, Verna had started to fall asleep on a recliner when Jack walked in. She got up, ready to start fixing him dinner, peppering him with stories from the day.

“Is there anything to eat?” he asked.

“Just leftovers,” she said

“Ah, jeez,” he said.

“How many burgers you want?” she asked.

“One,” he said.

“You’re giving me too much,” he said.

“It’s too hot,” he said.

“Too hot? Sorry,” Verna told him.

After dinner, Jack sat on the stool at the counter, looking for the first time all day like he was about to fall asleep.

“I don’t think I can do this much longer,” he said to Verna, who looked back in silence.

A moment later, Jack walked to a nearby drawer and pulled out a photo and studied it.

In the photo, Amelia, one day old and struggling to live, was surrounded on all sides by imposing machines. Jack recalled how the attending physicians wanted to give up on her, and how one single resident had made the case for why the baby might be able to make it.

Looking down at the photo, Jack thought of her strength, of the long line of survivors in his family.

Verna sidled up next to him.

Looking down at the same photo, Verna thought of all the people it had taken to keep those machines running, of all the help the family had received, of all the interwoven lives it took to care for another generation in America.