When the son of a nearby neighbor brings a plate of food to a local farmer during the Christmas holiday season in the late 70's, he is shocked to believe that the farmer might have wanted to end his life by freezing to death. While the farmer's son fires up the old woodstove in the room he is in and brings in wood, he asks about an old black and white photograph of a short, stout woman he has seen pinned on the wall. The farmer tells him the history of his family and the farming community that was established when his grandfather came back from the Civil War. And he goes back home imagining how it might have been and remembers his own early teenage years on Mt. Lake in northwestern Connecticut as a way of life he and the farmer have lost.