Coco, the Hillerys' milking cow, finds shade in the family's front yard.

Patrick, Ginger and Nora enjoy an August evening on the front porch. Ginger says she loves listening to the sounds of all their animals. "I don't want to ever move from here, ever. When I'm on the farm, I feel home."

Ginger and Nora laugh while reading "Charlotte's Web." Ginger reads to her children every night, after dinner or before bed.

Photos by REBECCA BARNETT The Roanoke Times

Ginger and her daughter Rose read from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer during a baptism service at their farm church. "My faith is so important to me," Ginger says. "Throughout the last few years and going through some really, extremely difficult times, it's become way more than a religion."

Ginger's Book of Common Prayer rests near loaves of freshly baked whole-grain bread at the Grandin Village Community Market. Ginger mills her own flour and bakes bread to sell. Thursdays she sells at the Catawba market, and Saturdays she is at Grandin Village, while her 14-year-old son, Patrick, sells loaves at Ikenberry Orchards in Daleville.

"Anybody have anything special you want to remember with our prayer?" Ginger asks her children. They routinely give thanks and pray at the table before dinner.

Photos by REBECCA BARNETT The Roanoke Times

Maggie, 13, milks Thistle, one of the family's milking goats, while Nora keeps the goat happy with enough grain to eat. "The kids do so much to help me out on the farm," Ginger says. "It's a real family venture, so everybody has different tasks." Maggie takes care of the goats with Rose and Nora; Patrick helps milk the cows and takes care of the poultry; and Thomas moves feed, takes care of the pigs and waters the cows.

Rose sprinkles milled corn for the chickens, geese and guinea fowl to eat.

Philip Hillery, Ginger's husband of 18 years, died of heart failure on Feb. 25 at 51. A childhood illness gave him "the heart of a very old man," doctors told him.

Photos by REBECCA BARNETT The Roanoke Times

Ginger Hillery and her youngest child, Nora, 6, stroll on their Catawba-area farm, where the family grows fruits and vegetables, and raises chickens, goats, sheep and cows. "I wanted my children to learn where all their food came from," Ginger says.

If you're a 43-year-old widow who home schools five kids, bakes 120 loaves of bread to sell each week and runs a small farm on Little Catawba Creek, this is a true fact: It's easier to castrate a bull than it is to caponize a chicken.

You may not realize this at first. In fact, you may even bring your farm-savvy daddy up from Texas to prove that the delicate poultry surgery is beyond the most capable of hands.

The 1,800-pound bull, though, he is putty in your steady, fearless hands.

Ask Ginger Hillery how she came to oversee such things within months of her husband's Feb. 25 death, and her answer is forthright, funny and not a little bit practical.

"Google: How to castrate a bull," she'll tell you.

If you think she's kidding, she's not.

When Philip Hillery died at age 51 of heart failure caused by a childhood disease, friends and family members urged Ginger to give up the 20-acre farm. It's too much to run your own bakery, raise animals and take care of that many kids without a husband around to help. What would happen when the sheep got loose?

But the persistent redhead would rise to those challenges the same way she stared down the bull.

She would do it with grit and grace, with the help of a vast network of friends and an occasional four-letter word.

As for her grief, she would soon learn: Nothing beats having to get up every morning to milk the cow.

Ratty work shoes

"Yesterday was a bad day," Ginger said on a recent Saturday morning. She was standing behind the Grandin Village Community Market table where she sells her freshly milled, whole-grain breads.

Yesterday was a bad day because she was cleaning out the barn when she unearthed an old trash can -- stuffed with long-missing dress shoes, leaky boots and children's sandals now two sizes too small. She was annoyed at first. Why did Philip bother cleaning up the shoes only to stash them away in a feed closet?

Then she spotted his ratty work shoes, the ones he'd gotten at Goodwill years ago. She started to throw them away.

But out of nowhere came the tears, a river of them, until she found herself on the barn floor, stroking the shoes and sobbing as hard as she did the week he died.

She recalled all the things he did on the farm -- the broken equipment he fixed, his homemade chicken-plucking machine, the way he drove the kids around the pasture just for fun. He once made them laugh so hard with his impression of an Irish step dancer that 13-year-old Maggie threw up at the dinner table.

Ginger wept openly as she talked about the shoes. Then, without missing a beat, she took a cellphone call from a Nepali immigrant who was back at her Full Circle Farm slaughtering a goat for purchase.

"Just find a shady spot," she explained, and resumed selling her breads.

'The fruit of her hands'

When the Hillerys moved to Catawba from the New Jersey suburbs in 2005, they were fulfilling a lifelong dream: They wanted their kids to experience the simplicity, work ethic and sense of community that living on a farm nurtures.

They had met in a Texas seminary and served together as overseas missionaries. An ordained Baptist minister, he traded stocks and renovated homes for a living while Ginger catered food and took care of the kids. They took care of Philip's parents before they died.

"He wasn't what you expected from a Baptist minister: He wore boots and traveled all over the world, and he drank beer," Ginger recalled. He could recite from memory the entire Gospel of Mark.

Having grown up in rural Texas and Oklahoma, she had always envisioned herself running a small organic farm. They decided on Catawba, inspired by a visit Philip took to the region for his 25th anniversary class reunion at Roanoke College. Friends took him to Roanoke County's Church of the Holy Spirit, where he listened to the Rev. Quigg Lawrence preach about his experience being lost overnight in the woods.

"Phil was motivated by the idea of living somewhere where you can actually get lost," recalled Lynne Florin, their college friend. "By the end of the week, he had sent Ginger down to pick out the property."

It reminded Florin of Proverbs 31:16 -- She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.

The couple attracted people to their farm like hummingbirds to the color red: college student interns, Bible study groups, and back-to-the-landers who saw the Hillerys as mentors.

Not that they were experts. They'd tended their first flock of chickens for 10 weeks when they huddled nervously with their friends, also newbie farmers, debating what to do next.

Philip and Ginger had watched the chicken-killing video on YouTube a dozen times, along with their neighbor Serge Depret-Guillaume, a physician. The kids corralled the chickens while the grown-ups recited the steps.

There was no way around it: Unless they wanted a mess of pet chickens, the time to slaughter was nigh. The men looked at each other and shuffled their feet, each one waiting for the other to pick up the knife.

But it was Ginger, finally, who stepped forward, took a deep breath and slit the first chicken's throat.

'I'd give my hand for her'

The day Philip Hillery died, he had already painted a house, cut firewood and made steak and eggs for his wife. He was rearranging the furniture in their upstairs bedroom when Ginger heard his garbled plea for help. By the time she reached him, he was unconscious.

Two years earlier, doctors had warned him to take it easy, saying: "You have the heart of a very old man." But there was no fix for it, and Philip refused to slow down. Why act like a dying man if he wasn't finished living?

What transpired in the wake of his death was something Lawrence had witnessed before in his ministry -- but never to this extent. "You expect sympathy and empathy when someone young dies, especially with lots of children, but this was completely off the chart," he said.

The EMTs who responded when Philip collapsed came back a few days later with several loads of firewood for heating. And again a few days after that.

A fellow market vendor gave Ginger a Suburban, but it needed a new transmission -- which was OK because a church friend who owns Pinkerton Chevrolet installed one free of charge.

Friends donated money so she could upgrade her ovens to produce more loaves of bread. Another family bartered milk in exchange for the cash to buy a bigger granite mill for her grain. Yet another paid an electrician to wire in the new equipment.

So it went with the water line, the broken tractor, the stanchion and all the grocery store cards that showed up in the mail.

Back in Texas, her parents wept when they heard about it all.

"The definition of grace is unmerited favor," Ginger explained recently. "Well, this was the biggest picture of grace I've ever experienced."

There are so many thank-you notes to write that she still doesn't know where to begin.

Instead, when the family climbs into the Suburban, they pray: God, help the people with lots of money to buy big cars from Mr. Pinkerton.

For the men who brought the family firewood: Lord, keep them warm.

When the tractor engine turns over: God bless Blue Ridge Diesel for giving me a tool I need.

Church for the unchurched

Friends say the outpouring came as no surprise. The Hillerys were simply reaping the benefits of the close ties they had forged for so many years.

"She did so much good for everybody ... I'd give my hand for her if I could," said Josh Owens. He attends the small house church that Philip Hillery began last fall -- what Ginger calls "our little organic farm church for the unchurched."

A few weeks ago, Owens asked Ginger to baptize him in a Bent Mountain creek. Having grown up in a strict, rural church, he had eschewed religion for decades -- until his wife invited him to sit in on the Hillerys' Anglican-inspired service. (The Hillerys are still members of the Church of the Holy Spirit and, with that church's blessing, consider their mission a "church plant," or offshoot of the larger church.)

The 15 to 20 parishioners meet twice a month under a willow tree near the red barn. Ginger reads from the Book of Common Prayer and she preaches in the place of Philip, who was studying to become an ordained Anglican priest when he died.

Her sermons, much like her blog about farm life, are reminiscent of the writer Anne Lamott -- reverent but real, able to inspire laughter as well as tears. During Owens' baptism, she stumbled briefly while dunking him, then let loose a joyful, sheepish laugh.

"I appreciate that she doesn't have to be perfect," pastor Lawrence said. "There's a lot of fake faith out there, but I look at this woman and I think, 'Man, this is a person of real faith.' "

Her determination to sustain both farm and church reminds her friend Stewart Depret-Guillaume of the speech that Aragorn makes before the last battle in "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King."

"You know she'll make it because she's always the bravest one in the room. She's the first to butcher the chicken; that's just who she is."

Shotgun wedding

A hot day in late July: Three sheep are loose. Ginger's key piece of bakery equipment, the grain mill, is making ominous, about-to-break noises.

And 6-year-old Nora is having a sad, missing-her-dad day -- which explains why mom is reading her a book on the front porch instead of attending the much-anticipated wedding of the family cat, Tabby, to the visiting Spanish water dog, Fred.

Maggie and her 13-year-old family friend from New Jersey have been planning the wedding since the family's visit last summer. The girls' older brothers are picking plums and protesting the marriage on account of, sheesh, give the pets a little dignity.

Hay bales are arranged as church pews, zinnias strewn in the grass aisle. Maggie squeezes Tabby into one of her old baby dresses, and the girls sing "Here Comes the Bride." As a substitute for rings, they apply blue fingernail polish to the pets' claws.

During the forced kissing of the bride, the cat lunges at the dog's nose, drawing blood, then runs for the woods like a moonshiner on the lam.

"Tabby, love is painful," Maggie's older brother Patrick says.

With her recent decision to enroll the children in Botetourt County schools, Ginger worries about missing moments such as this. But being a widow farmer, even a brave one, has its limits.

"There are so many farmers who do it better than us," she said. "We shouldn't even be here, except that we love our life very, very much. Even the icky parts are bizarrely good."

Friends are teaching her to drive the tractor, but when she finds herself alone and grinding the gears or fumbling a hay bale, she blushes. She still has some very bad days.

Moments after the mill breaks -- which it does, before the week is out -- someone calls wanting to buy her beekeeping equipment. It makes up for the money she'll lose over the weekend when she can't sell her bread.

The next day, a milk customer drops by and diagnoses the ailing mill. Then a friend who happens to dabble in small motors offers her a spare one for the mill -- and refuses to take a check.

That Thursday, she's back in business at the Catawba market. When a fierce storm blows up, vendors and customers alike brave the sideways rain to hold down battered tents and protect one another's food.

The widow of Full Circle Farm is drenched, but the sun reappears and more customers show up, and the bread loaves (even the damp ones) are sold -- another icky moment that turns out bizarrely, providentially good.