More dead people than live ones inhabit my dirt road. The count is two hundred eleven dead, thirteen alive. When you move into a mixed neighborhood like that, it's wise to make changes cautiously, balancing personal preferences with local expectations.

When I moved here, thirty years ago, the challenge was even greater. I was moving into my grandparents' farm, and my grandfather was buried between his two wives in the adjoining cemetery. My father was buried one row to the east. The house was still fully furnished with all the things I'd known as a child: the tall chest with forty drawers where my grandfather hid candies, magnetic Scotties and trading cards for me, the big kneehole desk where he sat each morning to write doggerel for The New Yorker and where he opened their rejection slips, and the high canopy bed where I'd join my grandparents for orange juice, graham crackers and hot, lemon-scented washcloths to start the day.

The very first night I discovered how hard it would be to take ownership of this much loved place. I put my children in their cribs, then tucked myself into the canopy bed. Immediately I rolled into the deep trough on the right hand side of the bed, the trough my heavy grandfather had worn over many years. I thought of him lying there with my grandmother; I thought of him sick and tossing about. Too much! I fled into the guest room, not the one I'd used as a child but the one for grownups. There I could sleep.

The next day was Dump Day. I decided to perform a small exorcism ritual. My grandfather had installed a mechanical stair to haul him from the first floor to the second. I would get rid of it, get rid of this reminder of his sick days, rewrite the story with a better ending. It took a wrecker bar, bolt cutters and several sweaty hours, but I demolished the rails, the motor and the gray metal chair and hauled them off to the dump. Piece by piece I hurled them off the hill toward Mt. Monadnock. They joined the piles of garbage, rusty appliances and construction debris smoldering below.

Old Mr. Hunt, the dumpmaster, came over to chat. "Too bad," he opined, "I heard your grampa paid over two thousand dollars for that. I bet someone woulda paid you at least eight hunnert for it and took it apart as well."

Siggy was the commander-in-chief of domestic operations and of the dairy when my grandparents were alive. Her idea of breakfast was a spread on the side table of three kinds of cereal -- oatmeal, Wheaties and Cheerios -- three kinds of freshly picked berries in special berry bowls, a dish of grated maple sugar and one of white, a pitcher of yesterday's milk and one of Jersey cream so heavy it had to be spooned onto the cereaL There was home made sausage and bacon, fresh baked bread and several jars of home made preserves.

At first I struggled to recreate this effect for my family. It was "the way things were done at the farm." I even bought heavy cream and mixed it with sour cream to simulate the spoonable cream I remembered. One day I dropped one of the three berry bowls, and it shattered. I felt shame -- and then liberation. From now on I would only have to pick two kinds of berries. Soon the cereal was offered in boxes, and the bread was store-bought.

"Too bad," my husband said, "but that thick cream always made me feel sick."

By then I was spending a lot of time washing dishes. One morning I finally noticed that the view from the kitchen sink was of a solid wall with shelves holding boxes of SOS pads, cans of Bon Ami and Ajax the foaming cleanser, bottle brushes and worn sponges. Clearly Siggy's aesthetic needs had never been considered. But mine were going to be, and "Yes, Mr. LaRoche could come in a week and put in a window and move the clothes washer and make a counter. And yes, he would be happy to use old wood from the shop barn. And maybe he'd even left it there himself when he did some work for my grandmother in '33."

So it was done and was a vast improvement except that the window looked out on a bramble and burdock patch.

That meant that we dug it all up, saw how rich the soil was and moved the vegetable garden. Soon it looked like Findhorn, with cabbages the size of wheelbarrows.

Which in turn meant that the kitchen grew so appealing that people wanted to hang out there, but there was no place for them to sit.

So we demolished the wall behind the sink with its nearly new window and extended the kitchen.

Now people stay in the kitchen when I cook. I'm sure Siggy would be horrified at first, but then she'd glance out the window and spot a goldfinch bending down a thistle head or a hummingbird humming in ecstasy in a jewelweed, and perhaps she'd give grudging approval. Probably not, though; more likely she'd have Tony or Eugene get those weeds out. So would I, if I had Tony and Eugene to command.

The plants around the farm have changed gradually and moved around. I discuss changes mentally with my long-dead grandmother, and occasionally sense approval.

Descendants of her hollyhocks still seed themselves in the front border, but, without the manure from the cows, I couldn't keep the soil rich enough for her colossal delphiniums.

My creamy daylilies, though, are prettier than her common orange ones or her gold ones with the brown smudge on each petal. And the peonies I brought from my childhood home are thriving. They were old even before we moved into that house in 1950. Festiva Maxima, they are called. I translate that as Huge Party, but my Latin is frail.

Mam -- my grandmother -- used to sit in the back garden and appliqué delicate chintz flowers on quilt squares. There was monkshood in that garden then and huge bushes of mountain laurel. The laurel kept the walls too shaded, though; moisture was trapped and the sills rotted out.

So now there's myrtle with little white fritillarias and a wonderfully scented, salmon pink azalea, planted further from the wall. There is also a very Zen rock with polypody ferns struggling to establish themselves on top. Usually when I sit there, it is to sip a glass of iced tea before weeding some more. My grandmother's gauzy dress has given way to my jeans. It is startling to realize that her pink rose and her Siberian iris bloomed this June, and that she has been dead for fifty years.

Somewhere along the way I noticed that the farm was still known as the old Mason place, the name of the owners preceding my grandparents. At that pace it wouldn't be mine for one hundred years. So we all proposed names and finally chose "Too Bad Farm" -- too bad about all the mistakes we'd already made and all the ones we were still doomed to make through ignorance or hubris. Too Bad also in the superstitious way of not wanting to attract the gods' attention and letting them notice how lucky we were.

Lately I've realized that the farm is finally mine. Two trees fell in recent storms: a willow and a maple. In a crotch in the willow, ten or twelve feet up, a croquet ball with a red stripe was embedded and had been almost completely surrounded by new wood. One of my children had really sent another's ball to Kalamazoo in some hard-fought game that no one can remember. And in the center of a core of crumbly decayed wood in the maple rested our old tether ball, looking like an improbable dinosaur egg waiting for global warming to restore its habitat.

In my turn, I've grown crotchety about new people in the neighborhood, people who move too fast, people who've cleared so many trees that their house is visible from mine. Theirs is the only visible house, the only reminder that it is no longer the 18th century and that the farm has survived its first two hundred years. "Don't choke on the small bones," I remind myself, and "remember that New Hampshire grows great trees; just wait sixty years or so."

Since I've lived here, the contents of four households and accumulations from many auctions have been added. Almost nothing has been removed. I could never face the task of packing it all up, so I imagine I'll just stay here, first at the farm, then at the cemetery. Actually I'll have to rest just outside the cemetery; the family plot is full, and the rest of the cemetery is spoken for. But I measured, and I could be less than two rods from the rest of my family. And I've learned how to establish my own place without disrupting what's already there. It's mainly a question of time . . . and listening carefully to the neighbors.