“‘Nothing is nicer,’ Grandpa used to say, ‘than a full barn and a full granary.’ He might have said a full cellar too, for the rows of bottled fruit loomed on the shelves in the dim light, and the aroma of apples filled the nostrils. We could sit down at the dinner table knowing where everything on it had come from, and the process by which it had been prepared. We had before us and around us tangible evidence of the interconnection of things, of tilling, and seedtime, and harvest, of process and product, work and reward. Abundance is what remained when the threshing was done and the mellow Utah autumn slid gradually into winter, abundance in the storehouse for man and beast, evidence that we reap as we have sown. And abundance in the memory which lasts long after the barn and granary are empty hulks, for sometimes we also reap where others have sown.”—from chapter sixteen 
 

Edward A. Geary is an emeritus professor of English and former director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. His other publications include The Proper Edge of the Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah (1992) and A History of Emery County (1996).