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and had continued to live there after her marriage to Samuel Vane. Eighty-eight, widowed, and growing rather frail, she had finally had to give up her independence and go to live with her daughter in Sharon. And so she had put the house, which had been her home for an entire lifetime, on the market two years earlier.
    "Why hasn't it been sold? Is there something wrong with it?" I asked worriedly, giving the broker one of those sharp, penetrating looks I had learned so perfectly from my mother years before.
    "No, there's nothing wrong with it," Kathy Sands replied. "Nothing at all. It's just a bit off the beaten track, too far from Manhattan for most people who are looking for a weekend place. And it is rather big."
    It did not take Andrew and me long to understand why the real estate broker had said the house was big. In actuality it was huge. And yet it had a compactness about it, was not as sprawling and spread out as it appeared to be from the outside. Although it did have more rooms than we really needed, it was a tidy house, to my way of thinking, and there was a natural flow to the layout. Downstairs the rooms opened off the long gallery, upstairs from a central landing. Because its core was very old, it had a genuine quaintness to it, with floors that dipped, ceilings that sloped, beams that were lopsided. Some of the windows had panes made of antique blown glass dating back to the previous century, and there were ten fireplaces, eight of which were in working order, Kathy told us that afternoon.
    All in all, the house was something of a find, and Andrew and I knew it. Never mind that it was farther from New York than we had ever planned to have a weekend home. Somehow we would manage the drive, we reassured each other that afternoon. Andrew and I had fallen in love with the place, and by the end of the summer it was ours, as was a rather large mortgage.
    We spent the rest of 1986 sprucing up our new possession, camping out in it as we did, and loving every moment. For the remainder of that summer and fall our children became true country sprites, practically living outdoors, and Trixy reveled in chasing squirrels, rabbits, and birds. As for Andrew and myself, we felt a great release escaping the tensions of the city and the many pressures of his high-powered job.
    Finally, in the spring of 1987, we were able to move in properly, and then we set out taming the grounds and planting the various gardens around the house. This was some task in itself, as challenging as getting the house in order. Andrew and I enjoyed working with Anna, the gardener we had found, and Andrew discovered he had green fingers, something he had never known. Everything seemed to sprout under his hands, and in no time at all he had a rose garden, vegetable patch, and herb garden under way.
    It did not take either of us long to understand how much we looked forward to leaving the city, and as the weeks and months passed we became more and more enamored of this breathtaking corner of Connecticut.
    Now, as I walked through the sunroom and into the long gallery, I paused for a moment, admiring the gentle serenity of our home.
    Sunlight was spilling into the hall from the various rooms, and in the liquid rafts of brilliant light thousands of dust motes rose up, trembled in the warm July air. Suddenly, a butterfly, delicately wrought, jewel-tinted, floated past me to hover over a bowl of cut flowers on the table in the middle of the gallery.
    I caught my breath, wishing I had a paintbrush and canvas at hand so that I could capture the innocent beauty of this scene. But they were in my studio, and by the time I went to get them and returned, the butterfly surely would have flown away, I was quite certain of that. So I just continued to stand there, looking.
    As I basked in the peacefulness of the early morning, thinking what a lucky woman I was to have all that I had, there was no possible way for me to know that my life was going to change so profoundly,