A Waking Dream

Nearly everyone can name a place or two or, if they’re lucky, three, that for them is like no other. Those are the places that generate the emotional resonance and mystery and power of a recurrent dream—the kind of dream that psychiatrists like to analyze, in which every detail down to the smallest reveals the dreamer’s secret inner life. Everything in that dreamed place signifies; everything one sees and hears and smells and everything one learns about the place possesses an intense emotional valence. It’s in the moist density of the air, or lack thereof; the smell of the soil and all that grows in it; the slant of light in every season at dawn and at noon and when the sun sets; the sound of the wind through the trees and the rain against the roof in the middle of the night and the flick of winter’s first snowflakes passing the window pane. That’s how it is for me in the region that surrounds my home in the hamlet of Keene.

And it’s not just the physical environment that feels charged with mystery and meaning. The inhabitants of the place, both human and non-human, they matter, too—their social and political history, their culture and economy. The geology and ecology of the region and