We never spoke a word. Occasionally he pointed with one dirt-stained finger when I used my eyebrows to ask what to do. We shared his rusty crowbar, sometimes pausing to smooth the holes out of the thin gray earth where the heavy stones had been. He worked with the timeless deliberation of one who has no train to catch, no lover's tryst, no quota and no boss. Once or twice I urged him on with an impatient gesture or a strangled sound. We could finish the field so much more quickly, I was thinking, if only he would hurry up. He stopped from time to time to stand back and survey our work.

An hour later I was tired and he was not. I sat and watched him deliberately choose a wedge of rock to lever out a larger stone, and finally I understood. He would be here until dark, and tomorrow, and beyond. Progress - to arrive sooner, leave earlier and produce more; to buy more complicated tools to create greater output to earn more. These things had little meaning amidst the timeless fields. From where I sat, overlooking a bubbling river flanked by ancient walls of hand-placed stone, such ambitions made no sense. He worked the fields as his ancestors had. If his father had time to sow and harvest the crop, then so, in the end, would he.