The buggy left Talbotton before the dew had burned off.

It was John’s idea to start early. He had been describing the Old Bryan Homestead to her for years — the way the porch faced west into the valley, the pecans standing around it like a congregation, the mulberry grove along the approach, older than anyone could say with certainty. His grandfather James had built it at the very edge of the Georgia frontier, he told her, on land that had been Creek country until ten years before the bricks were laid. Jefferson and Adams had been dead six years by then — our two beloved Fathers, called home together on the Fourth of July, in the year of our Lord 1826, as though the Almighty Himself had chosen the date. The world the house was built into had not lasted long. The house had lasted considerably longer. He wanted her to see it in good light. She had told him, more than once, that she could write about almost anything if the light was right, and he had taken this seriously.

The persimmon trees going orange along the Talbotton road. A hound asleep in the middle of a lane, not bothering to move until the buggy was nearly on top of him, and even then only rolling to the side with the aggrieved dignity of a dog who considers the road’s intrusion upon his rest a personal affront. The red clay of the road between Talbotton and Butler, which had been dry enough to raise a fine dust behind them and had left, she noticed, a faint red stain along the hem of her good traveling dress before they had gone three miles.

She was twenty-nine years old. She had been writing for the Talbotton New Era since she was fourteen, covering society columns and literary matters and the thousand small events that constituted the public life of a small Georgia town in the last years of a century that had contained, she sometimes thought, more history than any century had a right to. She had covered parties and weddings and funerals and the occasional political excitement. She had written a plea for Wesleyan College that had been reproduced in papers across the state. She was, by any reasonable measure, a woman who had seen something of the world, or at least that portion of it visible from Talbotton.

She had never seen Houston County.

They changed at Macon, taking the Macon and Florida Railway south toward Perry and Kathleen.

Macon always struck her as a city that knew it was important and wanted you to know it too. The terminal was busy even at midmorning. Cotton brokers and traveling salesmen and families with too many bags. A man selling newspapers near the door called out headlines she caught only in fragments — something about the President, something about the Philippines, something about the new century.

The new century. She had written about it in January, when the calendar turned and everyone in Talbotton felt that peculiar mixture of solemnity and giddiness that comes from standing on a threshold. Technically, she knew, the century had not turned at all in 1900 — there had been no year zero, which meant the twentieth century began on January 1, 1901, not 1900, a fact she found amusing precisely because no one had wanted to hear it and everyone had celebrated anyway. She had let it go. There were times when being correct and being useful were not the same thing, and a journalist learned to know the difference. Still, standing in the Macon terminal watching the departure board, 1901 felt improbable in a way that 1900 had not — as though the real newness had arrived quietly, a year late, while everyone was recovering from the party.

John appeared at her elbow with two cups of coffee and a look of quiet satisfaction that she had come to recognize as his expression when things were going according to plan.

“Track four,” he said. “Twenty minutes.”

He was thirty-two years old and had, she thought, the bearing of a man entirely at ease with the mechanics of travel — trains, schedules, connections — in the way that men who have spent years as traveling representatives of newspapers tend to be. He had covered Houston County and Talbot County and half of middle Georgia for the Atlanta Journal. He knew every depot between Macon and Columbus. He knew the conductors by name.

He also knew, she had discovered, exactly when to say nothing and let her look.

Kathleen was a small station with the particular self-importance of a place that has recently acquired a name.

Not long ago it had been just a stop in the piney woods of Houston County, twenty-seven miles south of Macon. Robert C. Bryan — John’s uncle, one of the best known and most learned physicians in the state, a man whose patients came by wagon from Dooly and Pulaski counties — had donated the railroad land on the condition that a depot and settlement be established there. The stop had been named after his daughter Nancy Katherine, who went by Kathleen. She still lived in the town named for her, John said. One of those continuities that Houston County produced without apparent effort.

The buggy John had arranged met them at the station. The driver was a Houston County man who greeted John with the warmth of someone who had known him since boyhood, which he had. They spoke of local matters — the cotton yield, a neighbor’s new mule, somebody’s barn that had come down in a storm — while Lynda arranged her bags and looked out at the landscape: flat and open, the sky very large overhead, the light of a Georgia autumn afternoon slanted and golden and entirely unlike the light over Talbotton, which was hillier and felt more enclosed. Here everything was open. You could see a long way.

Two miles south. She noticed the road immediately — not the red clay of Talbot County but fine pale sand, the wheels of the buggy nearly silent on it, the horse’s hooves muffled to a soft rhythm. Sand. Pines. The occasional farmhouse set back from the road behind a line of trees. The afternoon light beginning its slow negotiation with the western horizon.

John was watching the road with the expression of a man coming home.

“Around this bend,” he said.

The mulberry trees came first.

A grove of them, full and green still in the early autumn, standing along the approach to the house in the way that trees stand when they have been there long enough to consider themselves permanent features of the landscape rather than plantings. Mulberry Grove. She understood the name now. The trees had a productive, settled look — not ornamental but purposeful, the kind of trees that had fed silkworms once, or been planted by someone who intended to, and had instead simply become part of the character of the place.

And then, through and beyond them, the house.

Six white columns across the front, supporting a porch roof that ran the full width of the facade. The house faced west. Pecan trees stood around it with the comfortable authority of trees that have been in one place long enough to stop noticing they are trees. Across the road, large oaks marked the edge of the land where it leveled before dropping into a valley, and beyond the valley the sun was doing something particular with the light — the way Georgia autumn light does when it gets low and catches in the trees along a ridge — that she wanted immediately to write down and was not sure she could.

The house had been built in 1832. She knew this. It looked like a house that expected to be standing for another sixty-nine years. Possibly more.

John was watching her.

“Well,” she said.

He smiled. He had always been able to tell when she was composing.

They sat on the porch until the light was gone.

The porch was wide enough to be a room in itself — recessed from the edge so that the rain, when it came, fell past the occupants rather than on them. A deliberate design, she would learn later: what some called a rain porch, built so that the people sitting on it could stay through a summer storm and watch the weather move across the valley without getting wet. Someone had thought carefully about this porch. About what it meant to sit on it in all weathers. About the view.

The view west was the thing. The valley below the road, the oaks along its edge, the sky over the distant tree line going through its evening colors — rose and amber and the particular deep blue that precedes full dark. She had covered society events in houses considerably grander than this one and had never felt, sitting on their porticos, quite this quality of being exactly where you were supposed to be. This porch was not performing. It was simply oriented toward something worth looking at, and it had been doing so for sixty-nine years, and it intended to continue.

The family came and went through the afternoon. Neighbors stopping by, cousins she had not yet learned to place, the ordinary traffic of a family home on an autumn day in Houston County. She liked them. They were John’s people, and John’s people were warm and well-read and not without humor, which she took as a good sign. She had been introduced so many times as Miss Lynda Lee, the newspaper writer, that she had half-forgotten she was about to become something else as well. Mrs. Bryan. It was an unusual thing, to be in the place where a name had been lived in for three generations, about to put it on for the first time.

She thought: I will write about this. When she found the words.

John sat beside her in the particular stillness of a man who is happy and knows it and is trying not to disturb it. She had learned this was how he was with things he loved: quiet, careful, attending. The long stretches of Houston County farmland visible from the train window between Macon and Kathleen — he had described them to her once with a precision that surprised her, as though he had been memorizing the specific way each field lay against the horizon, storing it against the long weeks away covering other counties for the Journal.

It was, she thought, not so different from how she approached a sentence.

The sun finished with the valley and moved on, and the pecans went dark against the evening sky, and the first stars appeared over the western tree line with the punctuality that stars have always kept, being indifferent to the opinions of the people watching them from porches.

Somewhere behind them, in the house, a lamp was lit. The oil-light came through the window and lay in a warm rectangle on the porch boards at their feet.

In three months she would be Mrs. John Averette Bryan. In thirteen years she would be his widow. She would come back to this house again, and again, and again — the woman who inherited it, who restored it, who brought the family back to it every summer for twenty-six years, who wrote about it each time in the elegiac voice she had developed for things she loved and knew were passing. She would write of the colonial house that had stood the storms of nearly a century, of the oak and pecan groves casting their restful shade, of the fragrant bays wafted up from the valley below, of the old spring just under the hill with its thousand memories. She would list every name of every person present and note where they had come from. She would mourn a time fast fading into a silhouette of memory, and she would do it with such care and such precision that the place would survive in her sentences long after the last reunion ended.

But that was later. Tonight she was twenty-nine and the lamp was lit and the century was new — or new enough — and all of this — the house, the mulberry grove, the valley, the columns, the particular way the lamplight lay on the boards at her feet — was going to be hers.

She thought: this is a place worth knowing.