I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quietly and listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods, which could be a true revelation, hearing their different versions of history, who looked out the window of the schoolhouse and cried, “Our house is on fire!” and the day Joe Loucks drowned in the Rum River, and the winter night Grandpa woke up the seven of them and got them dressed and hiked out to the meadow to look at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What lives in memory is firsthand experience. I read the pundits’ eulogies but I remember those two women and those two audiences.

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