In the days before computers figured into writing, I would jot those butterfly lines down on a piece of scrap paper and keep them in my desk drawer, with other stray ideas. I knew they had to be captured immediately or they would flutter off forever. The line “We grew up like mice in a rotting sofa, my sister and I” came to me at a time when I had just moved into a house that possessed just such an item of furniture. It was a smelly old sofa, damp and featuring a green brocade sort of upholstery. It came with the used-to-be-a-chicken-house house that my husband and I purchased with my very first book advance from Ace Books. My advance was $3,500 and the run-down house, on almost four acres of choice swampland (oh, wait, we call those “wetlands” nowadays and preserve them!) cost us the whopping sum of $32,500. The payment of $325 a month represented a $50 saving over what we had been paying in monthly rent! And we could keep chickens for eggs. Such a deal!

From the attic, I could look up and see sky between the cedar shingles that were the roof. A brooder full of chickens was parked in the bathroom. (Buff Orpingtons for you chicken connoisseurs.) We regarded those twenty-five half-fledged layers as a value-added feature of the house, much better than a spare room. A spare room can’t lay eggs! There were no interior doors in the house, and some of the windows didn’t close all the way. We tore up the rotted carpet and lived with bare ship-lap floors. There were no shelves in the noisy old refrigerator; we cut plywood to fit and inserted it. The only heat came from a woodstove. It was thus a mixed blessing that the yard was dominated by an immense fallen cedar tree. My ax and I rendered it into heat for the house for that first winter, one chop at a time.

A week after we bought it, at the end of March, Fred said good-bye and went off to fish the Bering Sea, leaving me there with my faithful portable Smith-Coronamatic, three children under ten years old, an overweight pit bull, and a tough old cat.