What got me here was a six, according to the nurse who had devised her own scale. And I remember thinking, What must be the sevens and eights if this is only a six?

I have killed two of the wrong things to kill. It is not like the city where you know what to kill. First a preying mantis (they will eat the other bugs if you give them a chance to do it) and then a firefly which, without its glow, was just a beetle in the bathroom.

Some of those of us who stay here appreciate the trend toward doctors calling their patients “guests.” But I think I would be happy to wear a plastic bracelet and a white gown that fails to cover my backside. Patients, guests, we are expected to get well enough to leave, even if it is only for an afternoon drive. When I get a pass and a car comes to pick me up, what I have the driver do is park across the street from the gate so that I have this place in sight until it is time for me to come back. The driver can keep the radio on if he likes—or if she does. All I want is to see where I’m going next.

A pass is a formality; we can leave anytime we want. I usually call a car, but others take the bus into town. The time I took the bus, I felt sure that if the side of my face were to touch the window glass, the skin would be abraded, and I spent the duration of the ride leaning into the window.

At a famous institute of technology there is a room filled with scale-model trains set up to run in perpetuity through a scale model of the town that is home to the institute. You can watch the trains power along the tracks and through the tunnels and avoid near-collisions before you notice the clock on the wall and its madly spinning hands.

The clock is on scale time, of course.

Those of us who have to leave here, even briefly, feel, I think, that time, anywhere else, is like this—like scale time.

What goes on when things go well: I see Warren pushing the house cat “out to sea” on the Styrofoam cover of the ice chest on the pond. I brush a shed hair from my collar and the hair turns out to be cornsilk.

There is the unidentified object that flies. When any one of us spots it hovering above the house, we all grab a book and run to the lawn and hold up the books to show them what kind of people we are.

Shakespeare and Tolstoy!

Run get Jane Austen!

If you take the highway to get here, you will pass our favorite sign. Posted at the entrance to the housing development a few miles back, the sign says, RESIDENTIAL HOMES. Some of the residential homes are under construction still. We like the smell of cut lumber, the way post and beam meet, the men working so fast, cobwebs can’t form in the eaves.