When a House Is Not a Home

I grew up in a quiet place, in a house on top of a hill surrounded by birch trees on a road with no name, three and a half miles outside a town of about 1,700 people. (There are fewer now, closer to 1,400.) It was so dark at night in the winter that you could not see anything except the leafless birches, glowing like enchanted staves in the moonlight; a whisper in that cold empty air sounded like an explosion.