It took a long time to learn that story, and I don’t think it could have been learned much faster than Ina and I learned it. At the beginning, these women, who lived lives of the deepest loneliness—their homes sometimes at the end of dirt roads on which, you realize, you have driven thirty miles without passing another house; who were so unaccustomed to talking to strangers, particularly about personal matters—weren’t giving me the details I needed. Ina solved that. We had three fig trees on our property. Ina taught herself to make fig preserves, and when she started bringing a jar with her as
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