After My Husband’s Fu.neral, My Son Drove Me to a Remote Road and Said, “This Is Where You Get Off.”

My name is Eleanor Grace Whitmore, and I am 68 years old.

For most of my life, I was a wife, a mother, and the quiet force behind Hazelbrook Orchards—our small, organic apple farm nestled in the Pennsylvania countryside.

My joints may ache now, but my hands still remember the rhythm of pruning trees at dawn with Richard, my husband. That …