Then around the time she turned sixty, my father began to observe curious changes in her behavior. Always an early riser, who had gotten up at sunrise to fix coffee for my father and see him off to the barn, she began staying in bed until nine or ten, sometimes sleeping, sometimes just lying there. When my father or one of my sisters would ask if she was sick, she got angry. “Can’t a person take a rest around here without getting the third degree?” she said. Her cooking changed. Foods she’d prepared all her life—baked beans and corn chowder, anadama bread, chocolate chip cookies, turkey pot pie—started tasting different, and then someone would realize she’d left out a key ingredient like salt or flour, or put them on the stove, or she’d forgotten a dish she’d left on the stove until the smoke alarm went off. She repeated herself. She left things in odd places—her glasses, her car keys, even her purse—and when she couldn’t find them she burst into tears. One time she started out to the greenhouse to tell my father a salesman was there to talk about a new water pump.
