My children and I settled into a lovely, light-filled rental house much closer to their school, with big windows and a yard that was ours to enjoy rather than to labor over.

And I kept the mountain cabin — the one I had been ordered to go dig potatoes at — as our weekend sanctuary, a place we went to because we wanted to, not because anyone had sent us there.

One crisp Saturday morning in November, I took Leo and Maya up to the cabin for the weekend.

The autumn air was cool and clean, and the woods around the property had turned gold, and the children ran around the yard raking fallen leaves and, yes, laughing, harvesting the little potato patch near the garden shed — the very patch that had been named, months earlier, as my punishment.

Maya pulled a large, lumpy, misshapen potato out of the dark soil and held it up over her head in triumph, dirt raining down her arm.

“Look, Mom!” she shouted, grinning ear to ear.