“I had just turned six the first spring my parents brought me with them out to the fields. That was when the cycle of each year’s fieldwork began, in the spring. From then until the fall, there was no line drawn between the lives of the crops in those fields and our own lives. Those fields were our lives. What happened in them, down to the tiniest detail, became as familiar to me as the beating of my own heart. Year in and year out, from March to October, there was a rhythm to each day, the same rhythm of soil and sun and seeds and wind and rain that any farmer, anywhere, at any time, had always understood.”