I sat at the family table and drank wine made from grapes grown in the soil my husband and I had spent our lives tending, and I watched my daughter dance with her husband in the vineyard light, and I felt the things you feel at the end of difficult chapters when you have arrived somewhere true.
Not uncomplicated. Not fully resolved. But true.
After the guests left and the lights were still on and the crew was beginning the quiet work of clearing up, I walked down to the far end of the south field where the oldest vines were, the ones Richard planted in the first year, thick-trunked now and deeply rooted, producing the grapes that made our best wine.
I stood among them in the dark for a while.
Sixty-five years old. Ten years a widow. Eighty acres and a daughter who was choosing, I believed, to do the harder and better thing.
