It was coming on frost. Karl knew it with all his senses as he turned northward out of his lane and onto what was still called the Old Milford Road, though it was barely a cart trail now. He'd farmed all his sixty-eight years, and was as fit and fine a man as you might want, for his age. He'd been born here, at Headwater, in Prince Edward County, in 2043, just as the Long Troubles were drawing to an end in the Americas. Karl Hillier was the patriarch of an extended family of five couples, including himself and his wife Angelina, their married children, grandchildren, and his aged mother Sarah; four generations of Hilliers and twenty-three mouths to feed, in all.
The farm at Headwater provided well enough for them all, with good harvests for the last several years. By law, they would have to keep at least a year's worth of food in storage, some as grain in the attic that he had built when he first married, some as various dried and preserved nuts, meats, fruits, berries, vegetables and legumes in Angelina's pantry off the kitchen. The Elders might order the distribution of stored food throughout the County, or its collection for shipment to some hard-hit region in a famine year, though that rarely happened anymore.
Headwater Farm also boasted an ancient but ample root and wine cellar, with the drying attic over, and most precious, the original attached greenhouse for fresh herbs and a few greens in winter. There was a good barn and stable to feed and shelter the draft horses, oxen, and the lambing sheep through the coldest months, a solid hen-house, a pigsty and a drive shed. He and Angelina had been happy here, raising their family and building up the farm; it would be fifty years together next Midsummer's Day.
