An older woman lives alone on her farm where she works prodigiously to upkeep the five fields that produce many fine crops and livestock. Five years earlier, her husband drove off in his wagon and never returned. Since then, she has taken up a job cleaning houses in the nearby city of Arles, and lives a content life working the land. She is deeply religious in a peculiar way that emphasizes the physical world and its splendor, and she has a very deep spiritual sense of visual and physical beauty. At church, she looks at the paintings on the wall and sees into them like portals, gaining a deep unspoken understanding of her life and the world. One day she finds an odd young man in a barn, painting her cow, Bella. The two interact briefly, with the man talking and the woman mostly staying quiet and observing. The man is Vincent Van Gogh, and for many days he sticks around on the hillside, painting the woman, her cow, and the sloping field. He asks if she will come to his studio. Several days later she obliges and arrives at the home. She is struck by how many canvases there are stacked against the walls and on the floor, but enjoys the abundance. He paints her and she tries to understand the strange young painter who is so different than her more. In the days that follow, she begins taking care of him, cleaning out the studio, making sure he eats in hsi long hours of painting, and keeping his water bucket full for drinking. The two become close with one another, and Van Gogh wants desperately to see the world the way the woman does, so rooted in the physical and stoically wise. After watching him for many days, the woman picks up a piece of clay he had tried to show her earlier and begins shaping Bella's young calf out of it. The first one is not right, so she tries again. This turns into a routine, and every night the woman makes clay animals, moving onto the others on her farm. She makes swans, and goats, and many many cows. She does not tell anyone she is doing it, or even think fo herself as creating art. She does not revise or add on to her old statues, and only tries to make the exact image she can sense within herself as the "it" she is trying to create. One day, Van Gogh comes into her barn to visit and sees all the statues stacked along the rafters. He smiles, something he does not do often, and looks to her warmly. He tells her that seeing her art has shown him that she is a true believer in God, as he is.