because he was himself the quietest of his brood of brothers, growing only more
silent over the years, becoming so taciturn that one had to wonder whether he’d
taken an oath of silence. He was tall and gaunt, with an angular face lit by overcast,
sky-blue eyes and etched with a cloud-white beard.
Like all of his ancestors in the Netherlands, Michael was a dairy farmer, though
he’d once thought he might choose a different path. He’d studied tropical agri-
culture to “save the world.” He never ended up working in the plantations of trop-
ical nations, but he did make it out of the thirty-mile patch of the Netherlands in
which his forefathers had passed the last four centuries, and in which Michael pre-
dicted that his four brothers and their descendants may pass the next four cen-
turies, anchored there on that spot of land like mountains until eternity.
A few years into their marriage, Michael and Irene Miller* moved to Canada, to
the two-story brick-and-wood house they continued to reside in today. They farmed
the conventional way for their first ten years in the country, until Irene—whose hair
had then, in winters, roared red like saffron, and in summers melted into the coral
color of a setting sun—had an idea that radically altered their circumstances. She
noticed that organic, a movement that started sputteringly after World War II as a