In the late nineteen-sixties I lived for a year, with my then husband, in the middle of an apple orchard in northern New Mexico, some miles from the glorious Rio Grande Gorge. Our adobe house was equipped with nothing but electricity—no plumbing, no running water—so a fair amount of physical labor was necessary to get through each day. This was fine with me. My husband and I were both in our thirties and, like many of our generation, preoccupied with “finding” ourselves—I by writing something I could think well of, my husband by finishing a dissertation that had long been languishing. But, as I was often gripped by the conviction that any writer ten years my junior was already more accomplished than I’d ever be, I welcomed the time spent hauling water or raking the woodstove.

One day, we

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