Time ran like a river through her days, deep and smooth with no rapids to jostle and no danger to steer clear of.  It was as though she could see all the way back to that time when her family began and then look forward into the future to see her children and her children’s children going on in the way that never changed, and never ended.  She was linked to a legacy of family and faith and yet at the same time she was the root of a history that would continue after her days on the land.  To be a partaker of such permanence and contentment was all she had ever wanted and now she moved through the dream-like time in a steady and inexorable routine; rising in the morning with a sense of expectation, taking joy in the simple and the mundane, and sitting in the cool of the evening, reading from the Word or talking quietly with her husband.  All the parts of her life moved together with a clock-like precision – every moment interlocked with the one before and the one after.