Coco
McCabe

On the edge of the marsh in Ipswich, Mass., stretches the old Greenwood Farm—home to centuries of women who lived hard lives close to the land. The house that sheltered some of them still stands, more than 300 years old.

I walk by that house often with my dog, thinking of the women who endured and toiled there. One bore 11 children—without the comforts we take for granted like electricity and hot running water. Another remained childless, living out her life as a single woman for eight decades on the farm.

Beyond the house, the fields dip and rise, with paths cutting through the uplands and hugging the marshes, known once as “the hundreds.” The women may have walked these paths as I now do, each of us relishing the solitude and keenly aware of the mark of the seasons underfoot—the snow, the mud, the dust.

Now, with the world warming dangerously and the future of our planet so uncertain, I find solace in what’s left of the steadiness of those seasons and joy as they change. I imagine the women of Greenwood Farm did, too, and I envy their surety that it would always be so.