I was married in the backyard of my parents’ home, beyond which stretches a small wood. The wood was big enough, when I was younger, to imagine it endless, but small enough that I could find, easily, within it, the man-made ponds a neighbor had put in, to drain, I now presume, his land dry. The ponds were very close to each other and one wasn’t much more than the a muddy hole. The other, however, was a small circle of unnaturally bright blue, the very beautiful blue, tinged with green, that water is colored in children’s picture books. This pond was my thing, the thing I found in the wood, and the appearance, at one of my appearances there, of the owner of the pond, wearing elegant, alien jodhpurs, only served to reinforce the idea that this place was special, that meaning was attached to it, that things would happen around it. He told me I could come back whenever I wanted to.

All the great fairy tales take place in the wood. Our breakfast table sat beside a large picture window, through which you could watch deer move in and out of the brown depths and where I once saw, after a snow, a fox slide by. In the summer, the smooth mowed green of the lawn was set off by the wilder bushes, then the trees behind them. The tops of the trees were very high, and seemed to me years later, as I lay on my back in the yard, sunning myself, to form some kind of fence. But when I was younger, when I regularly read fairy tales, I looked into, rather than up at the trees.

What I wanted from the wood was a place to locate my imaginary activities. The wood should have been perfect for this: it was too small to be a real wood, and I couldn’t get lost in it. Even so, it was more real than I imagined. The deer, whose appearance in the backyard seemed romantic to me, and who were symbolic, although I didn’t know this, of the unseen existence of other things, were also real deer, and there were too many of them. They were stripping all the plants and still starving in the winter. Archers were allowed to hunt them during the season—I knew this too, I saw the trucks parked by the side of the road. Still, I was startled on a walk one fall, by hunters I couldn’t see. Do you want to get your dog shot? someone shouted, from his blind. They warned me to go home.

My parents still live at the same house, and the wood is still there, largely unchanged and undeveloped. The house, though, has grown, and extended its influence. Just before I went to college, my parents took out the apple trees and put a pool in—another man-made pond, a different blue-green. Then they had to install fencing around the property to keep people out of the pool. Later they put in higher fencing and even a gate at the bottom of the driveway, to keep out the deer, who, despite the hunters, multiplied, and ate all their plants. When I drive up with the David and the boys, a sign tells us to wait at the bottom of the drive for the gate to open out. I know some people miss the innocence of their youth, the crazy things they did, or the promise they felt that life held for them then. If I miss anything, I miss the porousness, the lack of definition, the bleeding edge between what existed in my imagination, and what was real.

My grandmother didn’t die suddenly, but I was far away, and very pregnant. I found it hard to let go. When my son was born I believed, privately, and without any system of belief, that she had been reincarnated in his form.

My son had curly hair and a head that, at least early on, drooped forward on its slender stalk.

In my dreams I changed my grandmother’s soiled pants.

They both loved me.

I’m not suggesting these things are evidence. There was no evidence for the belief, nothing that couldn’t be explained easily, gently, plausibly by my own psychological needs. Once, crossing the Chaussée de Waterloo after my grandmother’s death, but before my son’s birth, I passed a woman I was convinced was her spirit. She didn’t even look at me. It didn’t matter.

Now we’ve moved to a very old house. It was a farmhouse, and then a school, and then a private house again. It is porous, open to pests, and sometimes because of this and sometimes for other reasons, it creaks and rattles. The doors are blown by empty breezes. We moved here when our younger son, who is not my grandmother’s reincarnated soul, was less than one year old. He started talking soon after we moved in, which surprised us. One thing he liked to say when he and I were in his bedroom was that he saw people, sometimes behind me, always when there was no one there. At first I was, against my will, alarmed by this. It was nonsense, I told myself. I would not allow myself to imagine anything. But later, after I understood to what extent our house was infested with animals, I welcomed ghosts. I wanted to believe in them. I prefer ghosts to things, and to nothingness.