WINTER ARRIVED IN the form of small, dry snowflakes that came straight down out of a blue sky and hissed as they hit the ground. In early November the first of several howling winter storms slammed into the coast, dumping a trainload of moisture gathered up by the weather system as it moved along a storm track between Alaska and Japan. By Thanksgiving there was three feet of snow on the ground. As I worked— outside, under a tarp, with the shavings from a power planer flying out to mix with the blizzard— I kept tossing around what it really means to be middle-aged. The planks were from trees I had felled two years earlier, trucked to a small sawmill, and sawed into material for cabinets and flooring. Now I had two truckloads of lumber to mill, and it is no exaggeration to say that the shavings piled up faster than my insights into aging. According to U.S. census data, the average life expectancy for white males had increased from forty-eight years in 1900 to seventy-seven in 2007. The figures were skewed by turn-of-the-century infant-mortality rates, but nonetheless, fewer than two thirds of the twenty-year-olds alive in my grandfather’s time could expect to reach my current age. Now, nine out of ten men live into their sixties, and nearly half reach eighty. In a little over a century— less time than it had taken for the trees I’d cut down to reach maturity— the odds of growing old had risen exponentially. Feeding another plank into the planer’s whirling cutterhead, I wondered what such statistics should mean to men like myself who don’t spend much time fretting over things like retirement portfolios or risk management, or what they would have meant to someone like my grandfather, a West Texas rancher who climbed into a saddle when he was a young boy and stayed there until he dropped seventy years later. For generations my ancestors all worked the same patch of flint- and cactus-studded ground, and for such men— hardened by a relentless desert sun, two world wars, and a dust bowl— slowing down with age was never an option. (It was not until Franklin Roosevelt introduced his New Deal and social security in the 1930s that retirement became a possibility for any but the very rich. Now, thankfully, even those who make their living through sweat and labor are entitled to some leisure.)