It was in the early spring, because I remember I was way out in the hayfield, covered with mud, trying to get things ready for planting. Your oldest sister Meggie yelled for me to come running, and it took me almost half a day to get out of that mud before I could get to the house. So that must have been about the middle of March, maybe the year before the preacher came around to marry everybody. Seventy years later, the Smith family, descendants of Old Man Smith, sit around the kitchen table. Dad needs a headstone, and I need to tell Mr. Higgins his birthdates and such.
Silence reigns for a moment.
Finally, a woman cautiously answers. I think Mom said he was two years older than she was, which would make him 89 this year. The family discussion lasts an hour. Finally they decide that Dad probably would have been 84 this year, which would make him born in 1829. They choose a month in which none of them have a birthday, which comes out to be July.