Homeless

ix From the Editor Homeless Finding a true home is a central metaphor in nature writing. It goes a little like this: find a cabin in the woods, move there, declare it the center of your world and the fount of your words. Then choose one of two options: a) move away, because you have other lives to lead, and write about your sojourn in nature, or b) stay in that place and root down until they bury you in the ground. The resulting domestic chronicles have produced some of the best, and in recent years certainly some of the most, writing about the natural world. These books and essays tend to shine with homeowners’ pride, describing not just the outdoors but the doors themselves, and the shingles and crossbeams and other elements of construction. Even when they are written with humility, and with a sense that the writers don’t own the land so much as the land owns them—as in Wendell Berry’s words about Lane’s Landing or John Hay’s about Dry Hill—there is a sense of certainty and permanence uncommon in most contemporary writing, a sense that this is where the authors have planted their flags and this is where they will stay. But this is just one relationship with home, just one relationship with one’senvironment.Therearethosewhohavelesspermanent,butequally intense, relationships with their places. This morning I found myself thinking about a house on Cape Cod, not a cabin in the woods exactly, but an old house in the town of Dennis that dates from the early eighteenth century. It wasn’t town history but personal history that got me thinking about the house: it was in that house that our friend Elena died. Elena lived in the house for little more than four months and did so the whole time knowing that, barring a miracle cure, her time was running out. She was only thirty-eight when she was diagnosed with follicular dendritic sarcoma, just the sixty-first person on record to have that form of cancer. She learned about the disease’s invasion of her body when she went to the doctor because she was having trouble conceiving. About the same time she learned of the diagnosis another friend of ours found out she was pregnant. Elena responded with characteristic bluntness. x Ecotone: reimagining place “Great,” she said. “She gets to have a baby. And I get to die.” It was during the fourth fall after my wife and I moved back to Cape Cod that Elena and her husband Paul bought the old house on Main Street in Dennis. Elena was a beautiful woman whom I had gotten to know during summers on Cape Cod as a child, and though I hadn’t known her that well, by moving back she became a member of our close circle of friends. We were the same age; her fortieth birthday would be in January, mine in March. She had returned to Cape Cod in part to be near the Dana Farber Institute in Boston, where she would undergo experimental treatments, but also to return to the landscape she had loved since she was a child. This seemed to me a strong and healthy impulse, to come back home and root down into a beloved place in the face of death. Elena had lost her long, brown hair from chemo. That fall it was growing back short and spiky, and she had dyed it blonde. One day in September we all went to the beach. She looked so pretty, strong, and healthy throughout an afternoon of drinking beer and diving in the cool fall-ish water that it was hard to believe anything troubling was going on inside her. Later that week we threw a dinner party for Elena and Paul. Elena looked good, but the news was not. There was no standard way of treating her since only sixty other people had had the same type of cancer. She endured a series of treatments, increasingly experimental, with various doctors and hospitals in New York and Boston. As of her last visit they were out of options and she had been “dismissed,” as...