UITE EARLY the other morning, before it was light—I had been awake for some time already, thinking about an essay I was working on about Shaker architecture—one of the motion lights in the driveway came on, probably from a branch tossing in the wind. You will remember how your mother installed those lights at the behest of the insurance company some years ago, as a deterrent against any burglars who might happen up the long driveway at night when nobody is here—or, for that matter, when they are. (It seemed funny at the time, and still does, that a burglar would have any interest in an upstate New York farmhouse whose only contents are ladybugs and books from the 1940s. There is nothing here to steal; even the copper pipes have been replaced with plastic.) I didn’t remember seeing the lights come on, but rather just opening my eyes to notice they were on, and also noticing quite close to the window the branch hanging over the driveway, swinging back and forth in the wind. And this branch, which kept moving as I watched it, like a sort of fitful pendulum, affected me in the strangest way. Its nearness, the way it rustled and swayed at its own quiet level outside our window, gentle yet persistent, reminded me of waking up at night on Sanibel Island that time we took the children there in the early 1990s, and the way the oversize palm leaves rustled and banged against one another in the warm winds coming in off the Gulf of Mexico, so that we heard them in the dark and later at dawn outside our open window, making their sounds as we lay in bed together listening to waves crossing the Gulf over and over, stars visible above and the moon shining a white streak across the
