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M O L LY M O O C H I N G
April In the year 1901, Sanford Webb ran a dozen head of cattle on his new farm and watched to see where they settled down every night. The place they chose, he reasoned, would be the most sheltered spot in the hollow. That was where he built his house, with clapboard sides, a steep tin roof, and a broad front porch made of river rock. The milled door frames and stair rails he ordered from Sears, Roebuck. He built the house for his new bride, Lizzie, and the children they would raise here—eleven in all— during the half-century to come. In the 1980s those children put the home place up for sale. They weren’t keen to do it, but had established farmsteads of their own by the time their parents passed away. All were elderly now, and none was in a position to move back to the family farm and fix up the home place. They decided to let it go out of the family. Steven walked into this picture, and a deal with fate was sealed. He didn’t know that. He was looking for a bargain fixer-upper he could afford on his modest academic salary, a quiet place to live where he could listen to the birds and maybe grow some watermelons. He was a bachelor, hardly looking for a new family at that moment, but the surviving Webbs—including the youngest sisters, who lived adjacent, now in their seventies—observed that he needed some looking after. Dinner invitations ensued. When Steven eventually brought a wife and kids to the
