Nathan Coulter (Port William, #1)

by Wendell Berry

Once we’d passed him we could never be behind again. We’d have to stay in front, and it was a lonely and a troublesome place.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn’t be divided from the days he’d spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn’t know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn’t recognize the country when he was dead.