The only time I did not like going to school was when Tim was sick. This happened often, for, despite his active outdoor life, he was not strong. He always had a cold or a fever or some kind of rash. Then I would hurry home, trying to outrace darkness and always losing. The curse of a vivid imagination is when night comes and you are alone on a country road and the tree branches are creaking in the shadows. The flap of an owl’s wings will stop your heart, and the shriek of a dying rabbit is enough to put rockets on your heels. When I staggered, gasping, into the kitchen, my father laughed at me if he was there.

“Is the Devil after you?”

“I heard something in the woods.”

“There is always something to hear in the woods, Lizzy.” My father always called me Lizzy, and so did Tim. Everyone else called me Elizabeth.

“Anyway, it was cold.”

He would laugh. “Lizzy, Lizzy, haven’t you heard anything I learned you? Nothing in the woods will hurt you unless you hurt it first.”

“That may be,” I said. “But perhaps I might hurt it without meaning to. I don’t believe in taking risks.”

This would always send him up the chimney. I was first a little girl, yet I always talked like an old lady. That was because once something was in my head, it stayed there, and I had been reading all kinds of fancy books where people talked that way.

Also, we listened to the radio. It was a funny-looking contraption, not like the radios you see today, or even like the ones we had before television. It had an earphone that you held up to your ear. There was a little control that moved a piece of metal they called a “cat’s-whisker” over a piece of quartz. When you found the station, the quartz would sometimes hold steady for as long as five or ten minutes. Then you had to hunt for it again. I had a favorite station in Schenectady. At six in the evening a man would give the news in a deep mellow voice. Since the station was more than a hundred miles away, I regarded the radio as nothing less than miraculous and revered that unknown mellow-voiced newscaster. He used words I had never heard before, words like “situation” and “prognosis” and “kilocycle.” My father did not approve of the radio and never listened to it. Miss Pauline had brought it with her, saying that one day it would be the entertainment of the world.

“No more going down to Indian Lake just to see a traveling Punch and Judy show,” she would tell us. “It will come right into the home, free of charge, for all to enjoy.” My father laughed at her, and at the time, I thought he was right. Except for the mellow-voiced man at six in the evening, there was precious little that the radio had to offer me.