"Somebody had to stay and care for the folks. There warn't ever
anybody but Ethan. Fust his father-then his mother-then his wife."

"And then the smash-up?"

Harmon chuckled sardonically. "That's so. He had to stay then."

"I see. And since then they've had to care for him?"

Harmon thoughtfully passed his tobacco to the other cheek. "Oh, as
to that: I guess it's always Ethan done the caring."

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral
reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I
had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.
But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the nucleus about
which I grouped my subsequent inferences: "Guess he's been in
Starkfield too many winters."

Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that
meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and
rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered
mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as
Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C.
A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for
recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village
lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I
began to see what life there-or rather its negation-must have been
in Ethan Frome's young manhood.