November 1917: A cemetery on a hill, shaded by old trees. A Norwegian immigrant named Martin has bought a section of four plots near a row of Civil War graves. His younger brother is with the American army in France, fighting a strange, horrible, and vast war. But the site is not for his brother. Martin has lost his wife, Ingeborg, my grandmother whom I never met, a kind young lady of refined tastes and high social standing. She had married this blacksmith for love and followed him to the new world. His brother Karl will never rest in that family plot. He will return from the war alive, but he will go to the far north and spend the rest of his days in the woods alone, a lumberjack, hale and blunt, keeping his Pershing moustache into old age. Like many of his comrades, he lies now in an unvisited soldier’s grave. . . To his niece Ruth, Martin and Ingeborg’s daughter, Karl wrote from time to time the tender letters of a brave and solitary mind. . . There are two kinds of elegies: one is a melancholy contemplation, such as Gray’s “Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard”; and the other is lament and praise for the dead, ending with comfort and hope—such as Milton’s Lycidas or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. . . November is nature’s elegy. Let the month itself stand for grief and faith, a gray month of blank sky and cold winds, beginning in remembrance and ending in expectation—a month through whose strange beauty we all must pass and whose alien work must truly be our own.