Before he met the beautiful Concetta, Lou had resigned himself to working in, and eventually dying in, the coal mine, just as his father before him had done. He was uneducated, he aspired to nothing higher, and his future looked about as bleak as the company-owned coal-town where he'd grown up, Standard, Illinois. Then chance stepped in, and smiled upon Lou, through provision of an unlikely meeting between this coal-town scruff and a genteel city-girl from Chicago. For some reason unknowable, she liked him, and in that modest approval, she reignited in Lou aspirations he'd nearly forgotten, desires which had all but withered and died in the black mine which had already stolen from him more daylight than he should rightly have allowed. Thus, with his rediscovered yen for openness, greenness, sunlight and blue sky, with Concetta beside him, did Lou begin our family's farming epoch. It would be not the utopian adventure the two imagined, but an adventure still, and a story worth the telling.