Norah started thinking of the land as a document written slowly.
Floods underlined sentences.
Droughts erased cover.
Farmers added notes in fence lines, ditches, roads, and fields.
Generations forgot why some of those marks existed, but forgetting did not remove them.
One evening she found Eli sitting on the fence rail near the lower pasture. At sixty-nine he no longer climbed rails easily, but he refused to admit that getting down required more planning than getting up.
Norah leaned beside him.
"You stuck?"
"No."
"Want help?"
"No."
"You're stuck."
"I'm resting in an elevated position."
She laughed and stayed beside him.
For several minutes they watched cattle move through the field.
Then Eli said, "Your great-grandfather would've liked this."
Norah looked at him. "The logs?"
"You asking questions."
"You barely remember him."
"Enough. He saved everything. Receipts. hardware. bits of timber. Thought every old object was explaining something."
"That's why the workshop is impossible to clean."
"Exactly."
Norah looked toward the barn. "Do you wish you'd asked him more?"
"Every day now."
The honesty surprised her.
Eli continued. "When you're young, older people seem permanent. Then one day you're the older person and everybody with the first half of the story is gone."
"That's depressing again."
"Most true things have bad marketing."
Norah smiled.
"So ask while people are here," he said. "Write down what matters. And don't assume a thing is worthless because nobody remembers why it was kept."
That night Norah found a new spiral notebook and wrote ELI BELL - QUESTIONS on the cover.
The next morning she placed it beside his coffee.
He looked at it suspiciously.
"What is this?"
"Insurance."
"Against what?"
"You dying before I ask enough."
Eli nearly choked on coffee.
"Norah."
"What? You said ask while people are here."
He stared at her for several seconds.
Then opened the notebook.
The first question read: WHERE DID AMOS BELL'S WORKSHOP STAND?
Eli sighed.
"This is going to be exhausting."
It became one of Norah's favorite projects.
They did not work on it every day. Sometimes weeks passed. Then an ordinary conversation reminded her of something and she wrote another question.