Our family was like no one else's. My schoolfriends had fathers and grandfathers and uncles who did things, but in my family, women had been the doers.

Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.

I don't usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I'm older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I'd like that.

It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end.

Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but nighthawk migrations tell of shortening days and a season's end.

My maternal grandmother, Annie Sparks, lived with our family during the while I was growing up. When I came home from school, after having made a detour to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and fix a thick peanut butter sandwich on easy-to-tear white bread, I would go up to her sitting room.