The first time Sunny dragged our eight-year-old daughter away from the old orchard, I thought he had finally discovered something he wanted more than he wanted Lucy.
Probably a rabbit.
Maybe a groundhog.
Possibly some dead animal buried beneath the weeds.
Sunny was a Golden Retriever, and Golden Retrievers are magnificent animals, but dignity is not always their strongest quality.
This was a dog who once carried a muddy gardening glove around for two days as though it were a newborn child.
A dog who barked at a plastic flamingo because the wind had moved it six inches.
A dog who once stole an entire loaf of bread from our kitchen and then hid behind the curtains while still visibly holding half of it in his mouth.
So when he suddenly refused to let Lucy walk toward one particular section of our newly inherited farm, I assumed there was a normal dog explanation.
Then he did it again.
And again.
He barked at the ground.
Dug frantically beside an old apple tree.
Whined whenever Lucy approached the far end of the orchard.
Twice, he grabbed the back of her jacket and physically pulled her away.
The third time, he knocked her down.
That was when my husband started saying the words I did not want to hear.
“What if we can’t trust him around her anymore?”
I hated the question.
But I understood why he was asking.
Sunny had never hurt Lucy.
He had slept outside her bedroom when she was sick, waited at the school-bus stop with her every morning, and followed her through every phase of childhood with the patient devotion only a dog seems capable of giving without ever needing an explanation.
But something had changed.
Or at least we thought something had changed.
We did not understand that Sunny was not becoming dangerous.
He was becoming desperate.
And by the time we finally learned what he had been trying to tell us, our daughter was hanging over a thirty-foot hole in the earth while Sunny held the back of her coat between his teeth and refused to let go.
My name is Rachel Turner.
My husband is Daniel.
Our daughter, Lucy, was eight when this happened.
Sunny was five.
And the farm belonged to my father.
Or at least it had.
Dad died the previous winter.
His name was Henry Walsh, and he spent almost his entire adult life on fifty-eight acres outside Cross Creek, Pennsylvania.
Calling it a farm was generous by the time I inherited it.
There had been cattle once.
Then chickens.
Then a vegetable operation my grandfather ran.
By the time my father became the sole owner, most of the fields were leased to a neighboring farmer for hay.
Dad kept six acres around the house for himself.
A barn.
A machine shed.
A pond.
A vegetable garden.
And an old orchard planted by my grandfather sometime in the late 1960s.
When I was a child, there were more than sixty apple trees.
By the time Dad died, perhaps twenty were still alive.
Most were crooked, hollow, or half consumed by age.
Dad refused to cut them.
“They earned retirement.”
He used to say.
Daniel thought that was ridiculous.
I secretly loved it.
I grew up on that farm.
Then I spent most of adulthood running from it.
College in Pittsburgh.
Marriage.
Jobs.
A suburban house.
A supermarket five minutes away.
Neighbors close enough to borrow sugar from but far enough away that nobody knew what time we went to bed.
I liked convenience.
I liked sidewalks.
I liked ordering dinner and having someone appear at my door thirty minutes later.
Dad never understood.
“You can’t see the stars.”
He said once while visiting us.
“We have stars.”
I told him.
“You have reflected shopping-center light.”
He replied.
We argued about things like that affectionately.
Then cancer arrived.
Dad was diagnosed at sixty-eight.
Pancreatic.
Late.
Eleven months.
That was all.
I drove to the farm constantly during those final months.
Lucy came whenever possible.
Sunny came every time.
Dad loved Sunny.
Sunny adored Dad.
One of my favorite photographs from that year shows my father sitting on the back porch wearing an old flannel shirt and a knit cap because chemotherapy had taken most of his hair.
Sunny is sitting beside him.
Dad has one hand buried in the fur around his neck.
Both of them are staring toward the orchard.
Dad looked peaceful in that picture.
I did not understand how.
I was angry almost every day.
At doctors.
At time.
At myself for having moved away.
At Dad for not telling us sooner that something felt wrong.
Grief looks for somewhere to land.
When Dad died in January, the farm came to me.
Daniel assumed we would sell it.
Honestly, so did I.
The house needed work.
The barn roof leaked.
The heating system belonged in a museum.
Property taxes were not terrible, but maintenance was.
The neighboring farmer who leased forty acres wanted to continue, which helped.