On a broiling afternoon when the men were away at work and all the women napped, I moved through majestic depths of silences, silences so immense I could hear the corn     1    . Under these silences there was a / an orchestra of natural music playing notes no city child would ever hear. A certain cackle from the henhouse meant we had gained an egg. The creak of a porch swing told of a momentary breeze blowing across my grandmother’s yard. As I     2     along a mossy bank to surprise a frog, a     3    splash told me the quarry had spotted me and slipped into the stream. Wandering among the sleeping houses, I learned that tin roofs crackle under the power of the sun, and when I tired and came back to my grandmother’s house, I padded into her dark cool living room, lay     4     on the floor, and listened to the hypnotic beat of her pendulum clock on the wall ticking the meaningless hours away.

I was enjoying the luxuries of a rustic nineteenth-century boyhood, but for the women Morrisonville life had few     5    . Their lives were hard, endless, dirty labor.

For baths, laundry, and dishwashing, they hauled buckets of water from a spring at the foot of a hill. To heat it, they chopped kindling to fire their wood stoves. They boiled laundry in tubs, scrubbed it on washboards until knuckles were     6    , and wrung it out by hand. Ironing was a business of lifting heavy metal weights heated on the stove top.

They scrubbed floors on hands and knees, thrashed rugs with carpet beaters, killed and plucked their own chickens, baked bread and parties, grew and conned their won vegetables, patched the family’s clothing on treadle-operated sewing machines,     7    before the men to start the stove for breakfast and pack lunch pails, polished the chimneys of kerosene lamps, and even found time to tend the flowers that grew around every house. By the end of a summer day a Morrisonville woman had toiled like a serf.

At sundown the men drifted back from the fields exhausted and     8    . They scrubbed themselves in enamel basins and, when supper was eaten, climbed up onto the porch to watch the night arrive. Presently the women     9     them, and the twilight music of Morrisonville began.

The swing creaking , rocking chairs     10     on the porch planks, voices murmuring approval of the sagacity of Uncle Irvey as he quietly observed for probably the ten-thousandth time in his life, “A man works from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.”