I know him mostly from what others have told me about him, and from a very few old black and white photographs. I have his brow. He was a broad muscular man who doted on his little curly-headed girl. She grew up to be my mother. He was only in his mid-fifties when a stroke took him out of the fields and sat him down on the porch.

He lived with us for a while when I was two years old. I have vague memories of little clay farm animals he would make for me, a limp arm in a sling, and a cane. I remember how he ate cornbread. It seems ungrateful of me that I remember so little about someone who must have loved me so much. I was four when he died. I remember my mommy crying. I got sick at the funeral.

Elmer Skeens, my papaw, lived out most of his life as a farmer in the hills of eastern Kentucky. His world was more ancient than modern: fire-places, salt-cured meat, cabins made of hewn logs, mules, wagons, milk cows, neighbors, and God.

One of the things that most strikes me about that old world of his is how quiet it must have been. There were no buzzing fluorescent lights, racket-making dishwashers, obnoxious furnace blowers, deafening air conditioners, whirring computers, impertinent television sets, blaring radios, screaming vacuum cleaners, grinding power tools, beeping watches, rackety cars, or thundering tractors. It was quiet. A little girl on her way across the hills could whoop, and inside the house a half a mile away her grandmother would know that she was coming down the path. A little boy, sent to fetch his daddy from the fields for dinner, might hear his daddy down in the hollow crying out to God to save his soul.

And that is just what my uncle Eldon did hear some 60 years ago when he topped the hill overlooking the bottom where my grandfather had been plowing, and where God had been plowing, too. The mules were quietly browsing at the edge of the field. My grandfather was pleading with the Almighty. My uncle heard him, and he stopped and listened. God heard him, and he stopped and listened.

There is no story that I have ever heard about my Papaw Skeens that so knits my soul to him as does this story. I too have been down in the hollow plowing and being plowed until I finally have had to unhook the mules from their traces and cry out to God.

Dear Papaw! Oh, my dear Papaw, I am heartily sorry I never knew you better. We could have shared stories. But there will be time for that when the work is done and we're home. You tell me stories and I'll tell you stories. And we can put our brows together and weep for joy.