I grew up in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, in a draughty old clapboard farmhouse. Through the coldest months, we supplemented oil heat with a cast-iron wood stove, burning cord after cord of seasoned hardwood. So it is curious that I never learned to split wood or handle an axe until I went to the South Bronx.

Our farmhouse was on an apple orchard: a mile deep of McIntosh, Cortland, Red Delicious, Northern Spies, marching in neat rows towards the Adirondacks in the west. Across the road, a meadow subsided into a hardwood swamp running uninterrupted to the banks of Otter Creek, two miles east. Bread Loaf Mountain rose above and by October was often dusted with snow, the first intimation of winter. Growing up there was a strange and solitary idyll, governed by themoods of seasons and weather and family, the smells of mud and manure and mown hay and wood smoke. Long before my parents divorced, or the house was sold, or the orchard was razed for feed corn, this landscape instilled in me a sense of impermanence.